e the scars of smallpox. Yet, in spite
of all these precautions, which surely seemed as if they must secure
him complete immunity, his conscience tormented him; he was afraid. The
even and peaceful life that he had led for so long had modified the
morality of the camp. His life was stainless as yet; he could not sully
it without a pang. So for the last time he abandoned himself to all the
influences of the better self that strenuously resisted.

"Pshaw!" he said at last, at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue
Montmartre, "I will take a cab after the play this evening and go out
to Versailles. A post-chaise will be ready for me at my old
quartermaster's place. He would keep my secret even if a dozen men were
standing ready to shoot him down. The chances are all in my favor, so
far as I see; so I shall take my little Naqui with me, and I will go."

"You will not go!" exclaimed the Englishman, and the strange tones of
his voice drove all the cashier's blood back to his heart.

Melmoth stepped into a tilbury which was waiting for him, and was
whirled away so quickly, that when Castanier looked up he saw his foe
some hundred paces away from him, and before it even crossed his mind
to cut off the man's retreat the tilbury was far on its way up the
Boulevard Montmartre.

"Well, upon my word, there is something supernatural about this!" said
he to himself. "If I were fool enough to believe in God, I should think
that He had set Saint Michael on my tracks. Suppose that the devil and
the police should let me go on as I please, so as to nab me in the nick
of time? Did anyone ever see the like! But there, this is folly...."

Castanier went along the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, slackening his
pace as he neared the Rue Richer. There, on the second floor of a block
of buildings which looked out upon some gardens, lived the unconscious
cause of Castanier's crime--a young woman known in the quarter as Mme.
de la Garde. A concise history of certain events in the cashier's past
life must be given in order to explain these facts, and to give a
complete presentment of the crisis when he yielded to temptation.

Mme. de la Garde said that she was a Piedmontese. No one, not even
Castanier, knew her real name. She was one of those young girls who are
driven by dire misery, by inability to earn a living, or by fear of
starvation, to have recourse to a trade which most of them loathe, many
regard with indifference, and some few follow in