"If it is-" Defarge began, and stopped.
"If it is?" repeated his wife.
"-And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph-I hope, for her sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France."
"Her husband's destiny," said Madame Defarge, with her usual composure, "will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end that is to end him. That is all I know."
"But it is very strange-now, at least, is it not very strange"-said Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit it, "that, after all our sympathy for Monsieur her father, and herself, her husband's name should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by the side of that infernal dog's who has just left us?"
"Stranger things than that will happen when it does come," answered madame. "I have them both here, of a certainty; and they are both here for their merits; that is enough."
She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and presently took the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound about her head.
Either Saint Antoine had an instinctive sense that the objectionable decoration was gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its disappearance; howbeit, the Saint took courage to lounge in, very shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop recovered its habitual aspect.
In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine turned himself inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came to the corners of vile streets and courts, for a breath of air, Madame Defarge with her work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place to place and from group to group: a Missionary-there were many like her-such as the world will do well never to breed again.
All the women knitted.