“Good heavens!...  What poise!” exclaimed a young officer behind the lawyer, admiring Freya’s serenity.

Upon approaching the post, some one read a brief document, a summary of the sentence,—­three lines to apprise her that justice was about to be fulfilled.

The only thing about this rapid notification that annoyed her was the fear that the trumpets and drums would cease.  But they continued sounding and their martial music was as comforting to her ears as a very intoxicating wine slipping through her lips.

A platoon of corporals and soldiers (twelve rifles) detached themselves from the double military mass.  A sub-officer with a blond beard, small, delicate, was commanding it with an unsheathed sword.  Freya contemplated him a moment, finding him interesting, while the young man avoided her glance.

With the gesture of a tragedy queen, she repelled the white handkerchief that they were offering her to bandage her eyes.  She did not need it.  The nuns took leave of her forever.  As soon as she was alone, two gendarmes commenced to tie her with the back supported against the post.

“They say,” her defender continued writing, “that one of her hands waved to me for the last time just before it was fastened down by the rope....  I saw nothing.  I could not see!...  It was too much for me!...”

The rest of the execution he knew only by hearsay.  The trumpets and drums continued sounding.  Freya, bound and intensely pale, smiled as though she were drunk.  The early morning breeze waved the plumes of her hat.

When the twelve fusileers advanced placing themselves in a horizontal line eight yards distant, all of them aiming toward her heart, she appeared to wake up.  She shrieked, her eyes abnormally dilated by the horror of the reality that so soon was to take place.  Her cheeks were covered with tears.  She tugged at the ligatures with the vigor of an epileptic.

“Pardon!...  Pardon!  I do not want to die!”

The sub-lieutenant raised his sword, and lowered it again rapidly....  A shot.

Freya collapsed, her body slipping the entire length of the post until it fell forward on the ground.  The bullets had cut the cords that bound her.

As though it had acquired sudden life, her hat leaped from her head, flying off to fall about four yards further on.  A corporal with a revolver in his right hand came forward from the shooting picket:—­“the death-blow.”  He checked his step before the puddle of blood that was forming around the victim, pressing his lips together and averting his eyes.  He then bent over her, raising with the end of the barrel the ringlets which had fallen over one of her ears.  She was still breathing....  A shot in the temple.  Her body contracted with a final shudder, then remained immovable with the rigidity of a corpse.

Voices were heard.  The firing-squad re-formed in line, and to the rhythm of their instruments went filing past the body of the dead.  From the funeral wagon two black-robed men drew out a bier of white wood.