lippe
le Bel, who could not bear it and fled thunderstricken. Sylvie, a
woman and a jealous woman, answered that magnetic look with malignant
flashes. A dreadful silence reigned. The clenched hand of the Breton
girl resisted her cousin's efforts like a block of steel. Sylvie
twisted Pierrette's arm, she tried to force the fingers open; unable
to do so she stuck her nails into the flesh. At last, in her madness,
she set her teeth into the wrist, trying to conquer the girl by pain.
Pierrette defied her still, with that same terrible glance of
innocence. The anger of the old maid grew to such a pitch that it
became blind fury. She seized Pierrette's arm and struck the closed
fist upon the window-sill, and then upon the marble of the
mantelpiece, as we crack a nut to get the kernel.

"Help! help!" cried Pierrette, "they are murdering me!"

"Ha! you may well scream, when I catch you with a lover in the dead of
night."

And she beat the hand pitilessly.

"Help! help!" cried Pierrette, the blood flowing.

At that instant, loud knocks were heard at the front door. Exhausted,
the two women paused a moment.

Rogron, awakened and uneasy, not knowing what was happening, had got
up, gone to his sister's room, and not finding her was frightened.
Hearing the knocks he went down, unfastened the front door, and was
nearly knocked over by Brigaut, followed by a sort of phantom.

At this moment Sylvie's eyes chanced to fall on Pierrette's corset,
and she remembered the papers. Releasing the girl's wrist she sprang
upon the corset like a tiger on its prey, and showed it to Pierrette
with a smile,--the smile of an Iroquois over his victim before he
scalps him.

"I am dying," said Pierrette, falling on her knees, "oh, who will save
me?"

"I!" said a woman with white hair and an aged parchment face, in which
two gray eyes glittered.

"Ah! grandmother, you have come too late," cried the poor child,
bursting into tears.

Pierrette fell upon her bed, her strength all gone, half-dead with the
exhaustion which, in her feeble state, followed so violent a struggle.
The tall gray woman took her in her arms, as a nurse lifts a child,
and went out, followed by Brigaut, without a word to Sylvie, on whom
she cast one glance of majestic accusation.

The apparition of that august old woman, in her Breton costume,
shrouded in her coif (a sort of hooded mantle of black cloth),
accompanied by Brigaut, appalled Sylvie; she fancied she saw deat