e hands were contracted, dug his
nails into the assassin's neck--the nails which the Commissary Desbriere
and M. Jacquelin Audrays had found still red with blood.

Prades, who had come there either to supplicate or threaten, now had
only one thought, hideous and ferocious--to kill! He did not reason. It
was no more than an unchained instinct. The noise of the organs upon the
Boulevard, which accompanied with their musical, dragging notes this
savage scene, like a tremulo undertone to a melodrama at the theatre, he
did not hear. The whole intensity of his life seemed to be concentrated
in his fury, in his hand armed with the knife. He threw himself on
Rovere; he struck the flesh, opening the throat, as across the water
among the Gauchos he had been accustomed to kill sheep or cut the throat
of an ox.

Rovere staggered, wavered, freed from the hand which held him, and
Prades stepping back, looked at him.

Livid, the dying man seemed to live only in his eyes. He had cast upon
the murderer a last meaning look--now, in a sort of supreme agony, he
looked around, his eyes searched for a support, for aid, yes, they
called, while from that throat horrible sounds issued.

Prades saw with a kind of fright, Rovere, with a superhuman tragic
effort, step back, staggering like a drunken man, pull with his poor
contracted hands from above the chimney piece an object which the
murderer had not noticed and upon which, with an ardent, prayerful
expression he fixed his eyes, stammering some quick inarticulate words
which Prades could not hear or understand.

It seemed to Prades that between his victim and himself there was a
witness, and whether he thought of the value of the stones imbedded in
the frame or whether he wished to take from Rovere this last support in
his distress, he went to him and attempted to tear the portrait from his
hands. But an extraordinary strength seemed to come to the dying man and
Rovere resisted, fastening his eyes upon the portrait, casting upon it a
living flame, like the last flare of a dying lamp, and with this last,
despairing, agonizing look the ex-Consul breathed his last. He fell.
Prades tore the portrait from the fingers which clutched it. That frame,
he could sell it. He picked up here and there some pieces which seemed
to him of value, as if on a pillaging tour on the prairies. He was about
to enter the library where the safe was, when the noise of the opening
of the entrance door awakened his t