is better! Mademoiselle, until my return."

He saw them all out, followed them, and closed the door on the two; who,
left together, alone with the gaping window and the disordered feast,
maintained a strange silence. The girl, gripping one hand in the other
as if to quell her rising horror, sat looking before her, and seemed
barely to breathe. The man, leaning against the wall at a little
distance, bent his eyes, not on her, but on the floor, his face gloomy
and distorted.

His first thought should have been of her and for her; his first impulse
to console, if he could not save her. His it should have been to soften,
were that possible, the fate before her; to prove to her by words of
farewell, the purest and most sacred, that the sacrifice she was making,
not to save her own life but the lives of others, was appreciated by him
who paid with her the price.

And all these things, and more, may have been in M. de Tignonville's
mind; they may even have been uppermost in it, but they found no
expression. The man remained sunk in a sombre reverie. He had the
appearance of thinking of himself, not of her; of his own position, not
of hers. Otherwise he must have looked at her, he must have turned to
her; he must have owned the subtle attraction of her unspoken appeal when
she drew a deep breath and slowly turned her eyes on him, mute, asking,
waiting what he should offer.

Surely he should have! Yet it was long before he responded. He sat
buried in thought of himself, and his position, the vile, the unworthy
position in which her act had placed him. At length the constraint of
her gaze wrought on him, or his thoughts became unbearable; and he looked