the knitting women were vicious, with the experience that they

could tear. There was a change in the appearance of Saint

Antoine; the image had been hammering into this for hundreds of

years, and the last finishing blows had told mightily on the

expression.

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Madame Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed

approval as was to be desired in the leader of the Saint Antoine

women. One of her sisterhood knitted beside her. The short,

rather plump wife of a starved grocer, and the mother of two

children withal, this lieutenant had already earned the

complimentary name of The Vengeance.

“Hark!” said The Vengeance. “Listen, then! Who comes?”

As if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound of the

Saint Antoine Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been suddenly

fired, a fast-spreading murmur came rushing along.

“It is Defarge,” said madame. “Silence, patriots!”

Defarge came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he wore, and

looked around him. “Listen, everywhere!” said madame again.

“Listen to him!” Defarge stood, panting, against a background of

eager eyes and open mouths, formed outside the door; all those

within the wine-shop had sprung to their feet.

“Say then, my husband. What is it?”

“News from the other world!”

“How then?” cried madame, contemptuously. “The other

world?”

“Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished

people that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?”

“Everybody!” from all throats.

“The news is of him. He is among us!”

“Among us!” from the universal throat again. “And dead?”

“Not dead! He feared us so muchand with reasonthat he

caused himself to be represented as dead, and had a grand mockfuneral.

But they have found him alive, hiding in the country, and

have brought him in. I have seen him but now, on his way to the

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Hotel de Ville, a prisoner. I have said that he had reason to fear us.

Say all! Had he reason?”

Wretched old sinner of more than three score years and ten, if

he had never known it yet, he would have known it in his heart of

hearts if he could have heard the answering cry.

A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wife

looked steadfastly at one another. The Vengeance stooped, and the

jar of a drum was heard as she moved it at her feet behind the

counter.

“Patriots!” said Defarge, in a determined voice, “are we ready?”

Instantly Madame Defarge’s knife was in her girdle; the drum

was beating in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown

together by magic; and The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks,

and flinging her arms about her head like all the forty Furies at