nded by silk brocade and velvet, clothes, and lace. For days the
vessel swung with the tide, waiting for Anton Dormeur, who sought to
bring his daughter Mathilde and her husband, with their child, to be his
companions in flight. But Bartholde delayed, loath to part from the
farms and land that were his birthright. He and his little boy--the
first and only child--were on a visit to the old lonely house and its
grave master, when a messenger, his horse covered with blood and foam,
came thundering at the door, with the fearful intelligence that the
alarm was ringing at Alais, and that the persecutions of the Protestants
had begun.

Bartholde was in the saddle in a minute.

"Stay for nothing, but bring my daughter. Come on straight for your
lives to Saint Jean," cried the old man. "There will be post-horses
there, and I will order relays along the road where the people know me.
Meantime I will take the boy; he will be safe with me."

They never met again in this world. Bartholde died fighting on his own
threshold; his wife, the beautiful Mathilde, perished, perhaps, in the
flames. At all events, a wild figure was seen at an upper window just
before the great leaden roof of the chateau curled and fell. Fire and
sword spread in a widening circle round that district; the house of
Anton Dormeur was sacked. Achille Dufarge and his wife, the lovely Sara,
were in Paris, where no word reached them till long after, and then only
by a stranger, an old workman of the factory in Languedoc; so the months
went by, and then came the awful revolution that put an end to the royal
family, and enthroned the guillotine. Then the revolution passed out of
the hands of men, and the destinies of France seemed to be in the
keeping of murderers like Robespierre and Couthon. By that time the old
man and his grandson were in England; the boy having grown to be a tall
and handsome youth.

* * * * *

On the door-posts of a tall gaunt-looking house in a street of that
strange part of London lying between Spitalfields and Norton Folgate,
and known as "The Liberty of the Old Artillery Ground," might be seen
the words "A. Dormeur, Silk Manufacturer."

It was a dim-looking place enough, where the yellow blinds were nearly
always drawn over the front windows, and the summer's dust collected in
the corners of the high flight of steps, and was blown round and round
in little eddies, along with bits of string and snippings of