ed her.

It was she.

The man reached the top of the ladder. There he arranged the noose. Here
the priest, in order to see the better, knelt upon the balustrade.

All at once the man kicked away the ladder abruptly, and Quasimodo, who
had not breathed for several moments, beheld the unhappy child dangling
at the end of the rope two fathoms above the pavement, with the man
squatting on her shoulders. The rope made several gyrations on itself,
and Quasimodo beheld horrible convulsions run along the gypsy's body.
The priest, on his side, with outstretched neck and eyes starting from
his head, contemplated this horrible group of the man and the young
girl,--the spider and the fly.

At the moment when it was most horrible, the laugh of a demon, a laugh
which one can only give vent to when one is no longer human, burst forth
on the priest's livid face.

Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it.

The bellringer retreated several paces behind the archdeacon, and
suddenly hurling himself upon him with fury, with his huge hands he
pushed him by the back over into the abyss over which Dom Claude was
leaning.

The priest shrieked: "Damnation!" and fell.

The spout, above which he had stood, arrested him in his fall. He clung
to it with desperate hands, and, at the moment when he opened his mouth
to utter a second cry, he beheld the formidable and avenging face of
Quasimodo thrust over the edge of the balustrade above his head.

Then he was silent.

The abyss was there below him. A fall of more than two hundred feet and
the pavement.

In this terrible situation, the archdeacon said not a word, uttered not
a groan. He merely writhed upon the spout, with incredible efforts to
climb up again; but his hands had no hold on the granite, his feet slid
along the blackened wall without catching fast. People who have ascended
the towers of Notre-Dame know that there is a swell of the stone
immediately beneath the balustrade. It was on this retreating angle
that miserable archdeacon exhausted himself. He had not to deal with a
perpendicular wall, but with one which sloped away beneath him.

Quasimodo had but to stretch out his hand in order to draw him from the
gulf; but he did not even look at him. He was looking at the Greve. He
was looking at the gallows. He was looking at the gypsy.

The deaf man was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade, at the
spot where the archdeacon had been a moment before, and there, nev