young man--not more than twenty-five--built like a bull
for force and wrath. His was that colossal physique that develops in
the South; his shoulders were mighty under his mean coat, and his
chained wrists were square and knotty. He held his head up with a
sort of truculence in its poise; it was the head, massive, sensuous-
lipped, slow-eyed, of a whimsical Nero. It was weariness, perhaps,
that give him his look of satiety, of appetites full fed and dormant,
of lusts grossly slaked. A murmur ran through the hall as he passed;
it was as though the wretched men and women who knew him uttered an
involuntary applause.

"There is Peter," said some one near Rufin. "Lucky Peter; Quel
homme!"

The Huissier was memorizing for the little official the closing scene
of the trial. Rufin heard words here and there in his narrative.
"Called the judges a set of old . . . Laughed aloud when they asked
him if . . . Yes, roared with laughter--roared." And then for the
final phrase: "Condamnes a la mort!"

"You hear?" inquired the little official, nudging him. "It is too
late. They are condemned to death, all of them. They have their
affair!"

Rufin shrugged and led the way back to the office. But it was empty;
the girl had gone.

"Tiens!" said the official. "No doubt she heard of the sentence and
knew that there was no more to be done."

"Or else," said Rufin thoughtfully, frowning at the floor--"or else
she reposes her trust in me."

"Ah, doubtless," agreed the little man. "But say, then! It has been
an experience, hein? Piquant, picturesque, moving, too. For I am not
like you; I do not see these dramas every day."

"And you fancy I do?" cried Rufin. "Man, I am terrified to find what
goes on in the world. And I thought I knew life!" With a gesture of
hopelessness and impotence he turned on his heel and went forth.

The business preserved its character of a series of accidents to the
end; accidents are the forced effects of truth. Rufin, having
organized supports of a kind not to be ignored in a republican state,
even by blind Justice herself, threw his case at the wise grey head
of the Minister of Justice--a wily politician who knew the uses of
advertisement. The apaches are distinctively a Parisian produce, and
if only Paris could be won over, intrigued by the romance and
strangeness of the genius that had flowered in the gutter, and given
to the world a star of art, all would be arranged and the guillotine
would have but