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Chapter 39

Like a burned log on her own pile of ashes, Anna lay on the hospital bed; her feverish eyes fixed on the ceiling, across whose surface seemed to pass, with the mechanical regularity of a moving picture, images of people-living and dead.

There were Gertrude, Mary, Clement, the red-haired Combonne, commander of the Resistance troops . . . and Marie, almost a child. See how quietly her body lies against the edge of the pavement! There is a tiny, almost unnoticeable hole in her forehead, and from it the lifeblood drips, drips. People rush along, their feet stumbling against the still figure. They stop for a moment, then they go on again ...a solitary body free at last from its cross of struggle. A petty death in the midst of a great dying on the pavements of Paris!

And now she herself is running, with a host of men and women, all of them armed. Clutched in her hand is a revolver. Pierre had given it to her. "What a privilege to fight, gun in hand." They were Berger's words. Her heart pounds with pride; her feet hardly touch the earth.

And suddenly a sharp poignant pain drives through her left shoulder. She falls, picks herself up, and runs on again. A red-faced youth tears the revolver out of her grasp.

"You're wounded, lady," he shouts, "I can use it!"

She hates to part with the gun. She runs after the youth, summoning her last strength. He hurries on, about ten paces,