his happened, the light falling strongly on his face, and
bringing into relief its harsh lines and rugged features, showed him to
be a man past middle life, grey-haired, severe, almost forbidding of
aspect.

Peaceful as his occupation seemed, there was something in the air of the
room which suggested change, even danger. The floor was littered with
packing cases and with books piled together at random. On the low
bedstead lay a travelling cloak; on the table, by the reader's hand, lay
a pistol and beside it one of the huge sabres which were then in
fashion. Nor were these signs without meaning. The man reading on, wrapt
and unconscious, in his upper room, merely followed his bent. He read
and reasoned, though in the great city round him the terror of the
Revolution was at its height; though the rattle of the drum had scarcely
ceased with nightfall, and the last tumbril was even now being wheeled
back into its shed.

For men grow strangely callous. The danger which impends daily and every
day ceases to be feared. Achille Mirande had seen the chiefs of his
party fall round him. He had seen Petion and Barbaroux, Louvet and
Vergniaud die--the Girondins who had dreamed with him of a republic of
property, free and yet law-abiding. Nor had his experiences stopped
there. He had seen his foes perish also, the Hebertists first and later
the Dantonists. But for himself--death seemed to have passed him by.
Danger had become second nature; the very rumbling of the tumbrils
passing his house on the way to the guillotine had ceased to be anything
but annoying; until to-day, to avoid the interruption, he had left his
house in the Rue St. Honore and established himself in this empty flat
in the little Rue Favart.

By-and-by he laid down the book he was reading and fell into deep
meditation. As he sat thus, alone and silent in the silent room, a
sound, which a keener ear would have noticed before, attracted his
attention. Startled in a degree by it, he roused himself; he looked
round. "A rat, I suppose," he muttered. Yet he continued to peer with
suspicion into the corner whence the sound had come, and presently he
heard it again. The next instant he sprang to his feet; phantom-like a
door in the panelled wall at the back of the room--a door in the wall
where there should have been no door--was swinging, nay, had swung open.
While he glared at it, hardly believing his senses, a man appeared
standing in the dark aperture.

The man wa