lightning. The headsman howled with pain. Those near by rushed
up. With difficulty they withdrew his bleeding hand from the mother's
teeth. She preserved a profound silence. They thrust her back with much
brutality, and noticed that her head fell heavily on the pavement. They
raised her, she fell back again. She was dead.

The executioner, who had not loosed his hold on the young girl, began to
ascend the ladder once more.

CHAPTER II. THE BEAUTIFUL CREATURE CLAD IN WHITE. (Dante.)

When Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the gypsy was no longer
there, that while he had been defending her she had been abducted, he
grasped his hair with both hands and stamped with surprise and pain;
then he set out to run through the entire church seeking his Bohemian,
howling strange cries to all the corners of the walls, strewing his red
hair on the pavement. It was just at the moment when the king's archers
were making their victorious entrance into Notre-Dame, also in search
of the gypsy. Quasimodo, poor, deaf fellow, aided them in their fatal
intentions, without suspecting it; he thought that the outcasts were the
gypsy's enemies. He himself conducted Tristan l'Hermite to all possible
hiding-places, opened to him the secret doors, the double bottoms of
the altars, the rear sacristries. If the unfortunate girl had still been
there, it would have been he himself who would have delivered her up.

When the fatigue of finding nothing had disheartened Tristan, who was
not easily discouraged, Quasimodo continued the search alone. He made
the tour of the church twenty times, length and breadth, up and
down, ascending and descending, running, calling, shouting, peeping,
rummaging, ransacking, thrusting his head into every hole, pushing a
torch under every vault, despairing, mad. A male who has lost his female
is no more roaring nor more haggard.

At last when he was sure, perfectly sure that she was no longer there,
that all was at an end, that she had been snatched from him, he slowly
mounted the staircase to the towers, that staircase which he had
ascended with so much eagerness and triumph on the day when he had
saved her. He passed those same places once more with drooping head,
voiceless, tearless, almost breathless. The church was again deserted,
and had fallen back into its silence. The archers had quitted it to
track the sorceress in the city. Quasimodo, left alone in that vast
Notre-Dame, so besieged and tumu