e too late. The trains-de-luxe are full up. Therefore I shall
have to start at 2.48. Am I to start?"

"Yes."

"Our berths are booked. Will you come with me?"

"Yes."

"You know my conditions for interfering?"

"Yes."

"Do you accept them?"

"Yes."

"You will marry me?"

"Yes."

Oh, those horrible answers! The unhappy woman gave them in a sort of
awful torpor, refusing even to understand what she was promising. Let
him start first, let him snatch Gilbert from the engine of death whose
vision haunted her day and night... And then... and then... let what
must come come...

He burst out laughing:

"Oh, you rogue, it's easily said!... You're ready to pledge yourself to
anything, eh? The great thing is to save Gilbert, isn't it? Afterward,
when that noodle of a Daubrecq comes with his engagement-ring, not a
bit of it! Nothing doing! We'll laugh in his face!... No, no, enough
of empty words. I don't want promises that won't be kept: I want facts,
immediate facts."

He came and sat close beside her and stated, plainly:

"This is what I propose... what must be... what shall be... I will ask,
or rather I will demand, not Gilbert's pardon, to begin with, but a
reprieve, a postponement of the execution, a postponement of three
or four weeks. They will invent a pretext of some sort: that's not my
affair. And, when Mme. Mergy has become Mme. Daubrecq, then and not till
then will I ask for his pardon, that is to say, the commutation of his
sentence. And make yourself quite easy: they'll grant it."

"I accept... I accept," she stammered.

He laughed once more:

"Yes, you accept, because that will happen in a month's time... and
meanwhile you reckon on finding some trick, an assistance of some kind
or another... M. Arsene Lupin..."

"I swear it on the head of my son."

"The head of your son!... Why, my poor pet, you would sell yourself to
the devil to save it from falling!..."

"Oh, yes," she whispered, shuddering. "I would gladly sell my soul!"

He sidled up against her and, in a low voice:

"Clarisse, it's not your soul I ask for... It's something else... For
more than twenty years my life has spun around that longing. You are the
only woman I have ever loved... Loathe me, hate me--I don't care--but do
not spurn me... Am I to wait? To wait another month?... No, Clarisse, I
have waited too many years already..."

He ventured to touch her hand. Clarisse shrank back with such disgust
that he was seized wi