It tore the barren atmosphere of the office to rags; it made the place august and awful.  Rufin bent to her and took her clasped hands in one of his to raise her.

“I will do all that I can,” he said earnestly.  “All!  I dare not do less, my child.”

She gulped and shivered; she had poured her soul and her force forth, and she was weak and empty.  She strained to find further expression, but could not.  Rufin supported her to the chair.

“We must see what is happening in this trial,” he said to the little official.  “We have lost time as it is.”

“I will guide you,” replied the other happily.  “It!-is a situation, is it not?  Ah, the crevasses, the abysses of life!  Come, my friend.”

From the Salle des Pas Perdus a murmur reached them.  They entered it to find the crowd sundered, leaving empty a broad alley.

“Qu’est ce qu’y a?” The little official was jumping on tiptoe to see over the heads in front of him.  “Is it possible that the case is finished?”

A huissier came at his gesture and found means to get them through to the front of the crowd, which waited with a hungry expectation.

“The case is certainly finished,” murmured the little man.

A double door opened at the head of the alley of people, and half a dozen men in uniform came out quickly.  Others followed, and they came down toward the entrance.  In the midst of them, their shabby civilian clothes contrasting abruptly with the uniforms of their guards, slouched four men, handcuffed and bareheaded.

“It is they,” whispered the official to Rufin, and half turned his head to ask a question of the huissier behind them.

Three of them were lean young men, with hardy, debased, animal countenances.  They were referable at a glance to the dregs of civilization.  They had the stooped shoulders, the dragging gait, the half-servile, half-threatening expression that hallmarks the apache.  It was to the fourth that Rufin turned with an overdue thrill of excitement.  A young man—­not more than twenty-five—­built like a bull for force and wrath.  His was that colossal physique that develops in the South; his shoulders were mighty under his mean coat, and his chained wrists were square and knotty.  He held his head up with a sort of truculence in its poise; it was the head, massive, sensuous-lipped, slow-eyed, of a whimsical Nero.  It was weariness, perhaps, that give him his look of satiety, of appetites full fed and dormant, of lusts grossly slaked.  A murmur ran through the hall as he passed; it was as though the wretched men and women who knew him uttered an involuntary applause.

“There is Peter,” said some one near Rufin.  “Lucky Peter; Quel homme!”

The Huissier was memorizing for the little official the closing scene of the trial.  Rufin heard words here and there in his narrative.  “Called the judges a set of old . . .  Laughed aloud when they asked him if . . .  Yes, roared with laughter—­roared.”  And then for the final phrase:  “Condamnes a la mort!”