He burst out laughing:

"Oh, you rogue, it's easily said!... You're ready to pledge yourself to anything, eh? The great thing is to save Gilbert, isn't it? Afterward, when that noodle of a Daubrecq comes with his engagement-ring, not a bit of it! Nothing doing! We'll laugh in his face!... No, no, enough of empty words. I don't want promises that won't be kept: I want facts, immediate facts."

He came and sat close beside her and stated, plainly:

"This is what I propose... what must be... what shall be... I will ask, or rather I will demand, not Gilbert's pardon, to begin with, but a reprieve, a postponement of the execution, a postponement of three or four weeks. They will invent a pretext of some sort: that's not my affair. And, when Mme. Mergy has become Mme. Daubrecq, then and not till then I will ask for his pardon, that is to say, the commutation of his sentence. And make yourself quite easy: they'll grant it."

"I accept... I accept," she stammered.

He laughed once more:

"Yes, you accept, because that will happen in a month's time... and meanwhile you reckon on finding some trick, an assistance of some kind or another... M. Arsene Lupin... "

"I swear it on the head of my son."

"The head of your son!... Why, my poor pet, you would sell yourself to the devil to save it from falling!... "

"Oh, yes," she whispered, shuddering "I would gladly sell my soul!"

He sidled up against her and, in a low voice:

"Clarisse, it's not your soul I ask for... It's something else... For more than twenty years my life has spun around that longing. You are the only woman I have ever loved... Loathe me, hate me - I don't care - but do not spurn me... Am I to wait? To wait another month?... No, Clarisse, I have waited too many years already... "

He ventured to touch her hand. Clarisse shrank back with such disgust that he was seized with fury and cried:

"Oh, I swear to heaven, my beauty, the executioner won't stand on such ceremony when he catches hold of your son!... And you give yourself airs! Why, think, it'll happen in forty hours! Forty hours, no more, and you hesitate... and you have scruples, when your son's life is at stake! Come, come, no whimpering, no silly sentimentality... Look things in the face. By your own oath, you are my wife, you are my bride from this moment... Clarisse, Clarisse, give me your lips... "

Half-fainting, she had hardly the strength to put out her arm and push him away; and, with a cynicism in which all his abominable nature stood revealed, Daubrecq, mingling words of cruelty and words of passion, continued:

"Save your son!... Think of the last morning: the preparations for the scaffold, when they snip away his shirt and cut his hair... Clarisse, Clarisse, I will save him... Be sure of it. . All my life shall be yours ... Clarisse ... "

She no longer resisted. It was over. The loathsome brute's lips were about to touch hers; and it had to be, and nothing could prevent it. It was her duty to obey the decree of fate. She had long known it. She understood it; and, closing her eyes, so as not to see the foul face that was slowly raised to hers, she repeated to herself: