She waited.  But Gerald did not come.  She could hear chiefly the steady hum of the voices of the executioner and his aids.  She reflected that the room in which they were must be at the back.  The other sounds in the hotel grew less noticeable.  Then, after an age, she heard a door open, and a low voice say something commandingly in French, and then a ‘Oui, monsieur,’ and a general descent of the stairs.  The executioner and his aids were leaving.  “You,” cried a drunken English voice from an upper floor—­it was the middle-aged Englishman translating what the executioner had said—­“you, you will take the head.”  Then a rough laugh, and the repeating voice of the Englishman’s girl, still pursuing her studies in English:  “You will take ze ’ead.  Yess, sair.”  And another laugh.  At length quiet reigned in the hotel.  Sophia said to herself:  “I won’t stir from this bed till it’s all over and Gerald comes back!”

She dozed, under the sheet, and was awakened by a tremendous shrieking, growling, and yelling:  a phenomenon of human bestiality that far surpassed Sophia’s narrow experiences.  Shut up though she was in a room, perfectly secure, the mad fury of that crowd, balked at the inlets to the square, thrilled and intimidated her.  It sounded as if they would be capable of tearing the very horses to pieces.  “I must stay where I am,” she murmured.  And even while saying it she rose and went to the window again and peeped out.  The torture involved was extreme, but she had not sufficient force within her to resist the fascination.  She stared greedily into the bright square.  The first thing she saw was Gerald coming out of a house opposite, followed after a few seconds by the girl with whom he had previously been talking.  Gerald glanced hastily up at the facade of the hotel, and then approached as near as he could to the red columns, in front of which were now drawn a line of gendarmes with naked swords.  A second and larger waggon, with two horses, waited by the side of the other one.  The racket beyond the square continued and even grew louder.  But the couple of hundred persons within the cordons, and all the inhabitants of the windows, drunk and sober, gazed in a fixed and sinister enchantment at the region of the guillotine, as Sophia gazed.  “I cannot stand this!” she told herself in horror, but she could not move; she could not move even her eyes.

At intervals the crowd would burst out in a violent staccato—­

“Le voila!  Nicholas!  Ah!  Ah!  Ah!”

And the final ‘Ah’ was devilish.

Then a gigantic passionate roar, the culmination of the mob’s fierce savagery, crashed against the skies.  The line of maddened horses swerved and reared, and seemed to fall on the furious multitude while the statue-like gendarmes rocked over them.  It was a last effort to break the cordon, and it failed.