Juliette felt impelled by duty, and duty at best is not so prompt a counsellor as love or hate.
Her adventure outside Deroulede's house had not been premeditated.
Impulse and coincidence had worked their will with her.
She had been in the habit, daily, for the past month, of wandering down the Rue Ecole de Medecine, ostensibly to gaze at Marat's dwelling, as crowds of idlers were wont to do, but really in order to look at Deroulede's house.

Once or twice she saw him coming or going from home.
Once she caught sight of the inner hall, and of a young girl in a dark kirtle and snow-white kerchief bidding him good-bye at his door.

Another time she caught sight of him at the corner of the street, helping that same young girl over the muddy pavement.

He had just met her, and she was carrying a basket of provisions: he took it from her and carried it to the house.
Chivalrous--eh ?--and innately so, evidently, for the girl was slightly deformed: hardly a hunchback, but weak and unattractive-looking, with melancholy eyes, and a pale, pinched face.
It was the thought of that little act of simple chivalry, witnessed the day before, which caused Juliette to provoke the scene which, but for Deroulede's timely interference, might have ended so fatally.

But she reckoned on that interference: the whole thing had occurred to her suddenly, and she had carried it through.
Had not her father said to her that when the time came, God would show her a means to the end?
And now she was inside the house of the man who had murdered her brother and sent her sorrowing father, a poor, senseless maniac, tottering to the grave.
Would God's finger point again, and show her what to to next, how best to accomplish what she had sworn to do?
.