It is but the reprieve for her of a single day that I demand.
The day following the morrow I shall be dust, and you may wreak your vengeance on the life that remains.

Tush! judge and condemner of thousands, do you hesitate,--do you imagine that the man who voluntarily offers himself to death will be daunted into uttering one syllable at your Bar against his will?
Have you not had experience enough of the inflexibility of pride and courage?
President, I place before you the ink and implements! Write to the jailer a reprieve of one day for the woman whose life can avail you nothing, and I will bear the order to my own prison: I, who can now tell this much as an earnest of what I can communicate,--while I speak, your own name, judge, is in a list of death.

I can tell you by whose hand it is written down; I can tell you in what quarter to look for danger; I can tell you from what cloud, in this lurid atmosphere, hangs the storm that shall burst on Robespierre and his reign!" Dumas grew pale; and his eyes vainly sought to escape the magnetic gaze that overpowered and mastered him.

Mechanically, and as if under an agency not his own, he wrote while the stranger dictated.
"Well," he said then, forcing a smile to his lips, "I promised I would serve you; see, I am faithful to my word.

I suppose that you are one of those fools of feeling,--those professors of anti-revolutionary virtue, of whom I have seen not a few before my Bar.