For a moment Juliette still hesitated.  She was just on that borderland between childhood and womanhood when all the sensibilities, the nervous system, the emotions, are strung to their highest pitch.

Throughout her short life she had worshipped her father with a whole-hearted, passionate devotion, which had completely blinded her to his weakening faculties and the feebleness of his mind.

She was also in that initial stage of enthusiastic piety which overwhelms every girl of temperament, if she be brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, when she is first initiated into the mysteries of the Sacraments.

Juliette had been to confession and communion.  She had been confirmed by Monseigneur, the Archbishop.  Her ardent nature had responded to the full to the sensuous and ecstatic expressions of the ancient faith.

And somehow her father’s wish, her brother’s death, all seemed mingled in her brain with that religion, for which in her juvenile enthusiasm she would willingly have laid down her life.

She thought of all the saints, whose lives she had been reading.  Her young heart quivered at the thought of their sacrifices, their martyrdoms, their sense of duty.

An exaltation, morbid perhaps, superstitious and overwhelming, took possession of her mind; also, perhaps, far back in the innermost recesses of her heart, a pride in her own importance, her mission in life, her individuality:  for she was a girl after all, a mere child, about to become a woman.

But the old Duc was waxing impatient.

“Surely you do not hesitate, Juliette, with your dead brother’s body clamouring mutely for revenge?  You, the only Marny left now!—­for from this day I too shall be as dead.”

“No, father,” said the young girl in an awed whisper, “I do not hesitate.  I will swear, just as you bid me.”

“Repeat the words after me, my child.”

“Yes, father.”

“Before the face of Almighty God, who sees and hears me...”

“Before the face of Almighty God, who sees and hears me,” repeated Juliette firmly.

“I swear that I will seek out Paul Deroulede.”

“I swear that I will seek out Paul Deroulede.”

“And in any manner which God may dictate to me encompass his death, his ruin or dishonour, in revenge for my brother’s death.”

“And in any manner which God may dictate to me encompass his death, his ruin or dishonour, in revenge for my brother’s death,” said Juliette solemnly.

“May my brother’s soul remain in torment until the final Judgment Day if I should break my oath, but may it rest in eternal peace the day on which his death is fitly avenged.”

“May my brother’s soul remain in torment until the final Judgment Day if I should break my oath, but may it rest in eternal peace the day on which his death is fitly avenged.”

The child fell upon her knees.  The oath was spoken, the old man was satisfied.