Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/363

Rh target for him, unflinchingly continued to laugh, did not even deign to protect her face with her hands.

She had not recognized Laurent, but she took pleasure in exasperating this truculent ragamuffin and in driving him to extremities, firmly resolved not to allow her force of character to flag beneath the hostile gaze of the populace.

Laurent had come to that point of blind rage in which a scuffle began as a joke, degenerates into a massacre. In default of other ammunition, he would Have thrown pebbles and stoned her. The bonbons seemed to grow hard in the pressure of his sinewy hands, and such was the anxious silence of the crowd that they could be heard beating against the panes of glass, the walls and even Gina's face.

Finally, her face was covered with blood. Angela and Cora made Regina return into the room and closed the shutters after her.

With a final handfull of pepernotes, Laurent cracked the window behind which the courageous woman had appeared.

Then panting, weary as though from drudgery, as careless of the growling and the murmur of reprobation which his brutality drew from the well-dressed folk as he was of the amused laugh of the populace, he lost himself in the crowd, hastily gained a cross street away from the tumult and the swarm; and there, seized with shame and remorse, his former idolatry suddenly reacting against his sacreligious outburst, he burst into tears that smeared his makeup and made him look like the "little savage" daubed by Gina, twenty years before, in the garden of the factory.

A crowd which imperceptibly formed about this crying Pierrot brought him back so sharply to his rôle of