sappeared in the dark.

XXIII

Evariste Gamelin was worn out and could not rest; twenty times in the
night he would awake with a start from a sleep haunted by nightmares. It
was only in the blue chamber, in Elodie's arms, that he could snatch a
few hours' slumber. He talked and cried out in his sleep and used often
to awake her; but she could make nothing of what he said.

One morning, after a night when he had seen the Eumenides, he started
awake, broken with terror and weak as a child. The dawn was piercing the
window curtains with its wan arrows. Evariste's hair, lying tangled on
his brow, covered his eyes with a black veil; Elodie, by the bedside,
was gently parting the wild locks. She was looking at him now, with a
sister's tenderness, while with her handkerchief she wiped away the icy
sweat from the unhappy man's forehead. Then he remembered that fine
scene in the _Orestes_ of Euripides, which he had essayed to represent
in a picture that, if he could have finished it, would have been his
masterpiece--the scene where the unhappy Electra wipes away the spume
that sullies her brother's lips. And he seemed to hear Elodie also
saying in a gentle voice:

"Hear me, beloved brother, while the Furies leave you master of your
reason ..."

And he thought:

"And yet I am no parricide. Far from it, it is filial piety has made me
shed the tainted blood of the enemies of my fatherland."

XXIV

There seemed no end to these trials for conspiracy in the prisons.
Forty-nine accused crowded the tiers of seats. Maurice Brotteaux
occupied the right-hand corner of the topmost row,--the place of honour.
He was dressed in his plum-coloured surtout, which he had brushed very
carefully the day before and mended at the pocket where his little
Lucretius had ended by fretting a hole. Beside him sat the woman
Rochemaure, painted and powdered and patched, a brilliant and ghastly
figure. They had put the Pere Longuemare between her and the girl
Athenais, who had recovered her look of youthful freshness at the
Madelonnettes.

On the platform the gendarmes massed a number of other prisoners unknown
to any of our friends, and who, as likely as not, knew nothing of each
other,--yet accomplices one and all,--lawyers, journalists, _ci-devant_
nobles, citizens, and citizens' wives. The _citoyenne_ Rochemaure caught
sight of Gamelin on the jurors' bench. He had not answered her urgent
letters and repeated messages; still she