It had looked with its clear eyes, unshrinking, on the gleaming pikes and savage brows of the huissiers.

And now, alone in the dungeon, it put its arms round her neck, and murmured its indistinct sounds, low and sweet as some unknown language of consolation and of heaven.

And of heaven it was!--for, at the murmur, the terror melted from her soul; upward, from the dungeon and the death,--upward, where the happy cherubim chant the mercy of the All-loving, whispered that cherub's voice.

She fell upon her knees and prayed.

The despoilers of all that beautifies and hallows life had desecrated the altar, and denied the God!--they had removed from the last hour of their victims the Priest, the Scripture, and the Cross! But Faith builds in the dungeon and the lazar-house its sublimest shrines; and up, through roofs of stone, that shut out the eye of Heaven, ascends the ladder where the angels glide to and fro,--PRAYER.
And there, in the very cell beside her own, the atheist Nicot sits stolid amidst the darkness, and hugs the thought of Danton, that death is nothingness.