beautiful.

If Armand had been allowed to depart from here now, without having been
the cause as well as the chief actor in the events that followed, no
doubt that Mademoiselle Lange would always have remained a charming
memory with him, an exquisite bouquet of violets pressed reverently
between the leaves of a favourite book of poems, and the scent of spring
flowers would in after years have ever brought her dainty picture to his
mind.

He was murmuring pretty words of endearment; carried away by emotion,
his arm stole round her waist; he felt that if another tear came like a
dewdrop rolling down her cheek he must kiss it away at its very source.
Passion was not sweeping them off their feet--not yet, for they
were very young, and life had not as yet presented to them its most
unsolvable problem.

But they yielded to one another, to the springtime of their life,
calling for Love, which would come presently hand in hand with his grim
attendant, Sorrow.

Even as Armand's glowing face was at last lifted up to hers asking with
mute lips for that first kiss which she already was prepared to give,
there came the loud noise of men's heavy footsteps tramping up the
old oak stairs, then some shouting, a woman's cry, and the next moment
Madame Belhomme, trembling, wide-eyed, and in obvious terror, came
rushing into the room.

"Jeanne! Jeanne! My child! It is awful! It is awful! Mon Dieu--mon Dieu!
What is to become of us?"

She was moaning and lamenting even as she ran in, and now she threw her
apron over her face and sank into a chair, continuing her moaning and
her lamentations.

Neither Mademoiselle nor Armand had stirred. They remained like graven
images, he on one knee, she with large eyes fixed upon his face. They
had neither of them looked on the old woman; they seemed even now
unconscious of her presence. But their ears had caught the sound of that
measured tramp of feet up the stairs of the old house, and the halt upon
the landing; they had heard the brief words of command:

"Open, in the name of the people!"

They knew quite well what it all meant; they had not wandered so far in
the realms of romance that reality--the grim, horrible reality of the
moment--had not the power to bring them back to earth.

That peremptory call to open in the name of the people was the prologue
these days to a drama which had but two concluding acts: arrest, which
was a certainty; the guillotine, which was more than probable.