“You shall see,” said Vinet, grasping the colonel’s hand affectionately.

* * * * *

About one o’clock that night three clear, sharp cries of an owl, wonderfully well imitated, echoed through the square.  Pierrette heard them in her feverish sleep; she jumped up, moist with perspiration, opened her window, saw Brigaut, and flung down a ball of silk, to which he fastened a letter.  Sylvie, agitated by the events of the day and her own indecision of mind, was not asleep; she heard the owl.

“Ah, bird of ill-omen!” she thought.  “Why, Pierrette is getting up!  What is she after?”

Hearing the attic window open softly, Sylvie rushed to her own window and heard the rustle of paper against her blinds.  She fastened the strings of her bed-gown and went quickly upstairs to Pierrette’s room, where she found the poor girl unwinding the silk and freeing the letter.

“Ha!  I’ve caught you!” cried the old woman, rushing to the window, from which she saw Jacques running at full speed.  “Give me that letter.”

“No, cousin,” said Pierrette, who, by one of those strong inspirations of youth sustained by her own soul, rose to a grandeur of resistance such as we admire in the history of certain peoples reduced to despair.

“Ha! you will not?” cried Sylvie, advancing upon the girl with a face full of hatred and fury.

Pierrette fell back to get time to put her letter in her hand, which she clenched with unnatural force.  Seeing this manoeuvre Sylvie grasped the delicate white hand of the girl in her lobster claws and tried to open it.  It was a frightful struggle, an infamous struggle; it was more than a physical struggle; it assailed the mind, the sole treasure of the human being, the thought, which God has placed beyond all earthly power and guards as the secret way between the sufferer and Himself.  The two women, one dying, the other in the vigor of health, looked at each other fixedly.  Pierrette’s eyes darted on her executioner the look the famous Templar on the rack cast upon Philippe le Bel, who could not bear it and fled thunderstricken.  Sylvie, a woman and a jealous woman, answered that magnetic look with malignant flashes.  A dreadful silence reigned.  The clenched hand of the Breton girl resisted her cousin’s efforts like a block of steel.  Sylvie twisted Pierrette’s arm, she tried to force the fingers open; unable to do so she stuck her nails into the flesh.  At last, in her madness, she set her teeth into the wrist, trying to conquer the girl by pain.  Pierrette defied her still, with that same terrible glance of innocence.  The anger of the old maid grew to such a pitch that it became blind fury.  She seized Pierrette’s arm and struck the closed fist upon the window-sill, and then upon the marble of the mantelpiece, as we crack a nut to get the kernel.

“Help! help!” cried Pierrette, “they are murdering me!”

“Ha! you may well scream, when I catch you with a lover in the dead of night.”