"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."
And she beat the hand pitilessly.
"Help! help!" cried Pierrette, the blood flowing.
At that instant, loud knocks were heard at the front door. Exhausted,
the two women paused a moment.
Rogron, awakened and uneasy, not knowing what was happening, had got
up, gone to his sister's room, and not finding her was frightened.
Hearing the knocks he went down, unfastened the front door, and was
nearly knocked over by Brigaut, followed by a sort of phantom.
At this moment Sylvie's eyes chanced to fall on Pierrette's corset,
and she remembered the papers. Releasing the girl's wrist she sprang
upon the corset like a tiger on its prey, and showed it to Pierrette
with a smile,--the smile of an Iroquois over his victim before he
scalps him.
"I am dying," said Pierrette, falling on her knees, "oh, who will save
me?"
"I!" said a woman with white hair and an aged parchment face, in which
two gray eyes glittered.
"Ah! grandmother, you have come too late," cried the poor child,
bursting into tears.
Pierrette fell upon her bed, her strength all gone, half-dead with the
exhaustion which, in her feeble state, followed so violent a struggle.
The tall gray woman took her in her arms, as a nurse lifts a child,
and went out, followed by Brigaut, without a word to Sylvie, on whom
she cast one glance of majestic accusation.
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