“Listen!” he said.  “I have saved you, and I can save you altogether, if you choose.  Choose between me and the gibbet!”

There was silence, and then Esmeralda said, “It is less horrible to me than you are.”

He poured out his soul passionately, telling her that his life was nothing without her love, but the girl never moved.

It was daylight now.

“For the last time, will you be mine?”

She answered emphatically, “No!”

Then he called out as loud as he could, and presently a body of armed men appeared.  Soon the public hangman was aroused, and the execution which had been interrupted by Quasimodo’s heroic rescue was carried out.

Meantime, what of Quasimodo?

He had rushed to her cell when the king’s troops, having beaten off the vagrants, entered the church, and it was empty!  Then he had explored every nook and cranny of Notre Dame, and again and again gone the round of the church.  For an hour he sat in despair, his body convulsed by sobs.

Suddenly he remembered that Claude Frollo had a secret key, and decided that the priest must have carried her off.

At that very moment Claude returned to Notre Dame, after handing over Esmeralda to the hangman.  Quasimodo watched him ascend to the balustrade at the top of the tower, and then followed him; the priest’s attention was too absorbed to hear the hunchback’s step.

Claude rested his arms on the balustrade, and gazed intently at the gallows in the Greve.  Quasimodo tried to make out what it was the priest stared at, and then he recognised Esmeralda in the hangman’s arms on the ladder, and in another second the hangman had done his work.

A demoniac laugh broke from the livid lips of Claude Frollo; Quasimodo could not hear this laughter, but he saw it.

He rushed furiously upon the archdeacon, and with his great fists he hurled Claude Frollo into the abyss over which he leaned.

The archdeacon caught at a gutter, and hung suspended for a few minutes, and then fell—­more than two hundred feet.

Quasimodo raised his eyes to the gypsy, whose body still swung from the gibbet; and then lowered them to the shapeless mass on the pavement beneath.  “And these were all I have ever loved!” he said, sobbing.

He was never seen again in Notre Dame.

Some two years later, when there were certain clearances in the vault where the body of Esmeralda had been deposited, the skeleton of a man, deformed and twisted, was found in close embrace with the skeleton of a woman.  A little silk bag which Esmeralda had always worn was around the neck of the skeleton of the woman.

* * * * *

The Toilers of the Sea