The tiny room was inexpressibly hot and stuffy.  Hardly a breath of outside air came in through the narrow window, which only gave on the bedroom beyond.  An evil-smelling oil-lamp swung from the low ceiling and shed its feeble light on the upturned face of the murdered man.

Mole stood for a moment or two, silent and pensive, beside that hideous form.  There was the bath, just as he had prepared it:  the board spread over with a sheet and laid across the bath, above which only the head and shoulders emerged, livid and stained.  One hand, the left, grasped the edge of the board with the last convulsive clutch of supreme agony.

On the fourth finger of that hand glistened the shoddy ring which Marat had said was not worth stealing.  Yet, apparently, it roused the cupidity of the poor wretch who had served him faithfully for these last few days, and who now would once more be thrown, starving and friendless, upon the streets of Paris.

Mole threw a quick, furtive glance around him.  The crowd which had come to gloat over the murdered Terrorist stood about whispering, with heads averted, engrossed in their own affairs.  He slid his hand surreptitiously over that of the dead man.  With dexterous manipulation he lifted the finger round which glistened the metal ring.  Death appeared to have shrivelled the flesh still more upon the bones, to have contracted the knuckles and shrunk the tendons.  The ring slid off quite easily.  Mole had it in his hand, when suddenly a rough blow struck him on the shoulder.

“Trying to rob the dead?” a stern voice shouted in his ear.  “Are you a disguised aristo, or what?”

At once the whispering ceased.  A wave of excitement went round the room.  Some people shouted, others pressed forward to gaze on the abandoned wretch who had been caught in the act of committing a gruesome deed.

“Robbing the dead!”

They were experts in evil, most of these men here.  Their hands were indelibly stained with some of the foulest crimes ever recorded in history.  But there was something ghoulish in this attempt to plunder that awful thing lying there, helpless, in the water.  There was also a great relief to nerve-tension in shouting Horror and Anathema with self-righteous indignation; and additional excitement in the suggested “aristo in disguise.”

Mole struggled vigorously.  He was powerful and his fists were heavy.  But he was soon surrounded, held fast by both arms, whilst half a dozen hands tore at his tattered clothes, searched him to his very skin, for the booty which he was thought to have taken from the dead.

“Leave me alone, curse you!” he shouted, louder than his aggressors.  “My name is Paul Mole, I tell you.  Ask the citizeness Evrard.  I waited on citizen Marat I prepared his bath.  I was the only friend who did not turn away from him in his sickness and his poverty.  Leave me alone, I say!  Why,” he added, with a hoarse laugh, “Jean Paul in his bath was as naked as on the day he was born!”