a long line of English gentlemen.
A Blakeney had died on Bosworth field, another had sacrified life
and fortune for the sake of a treacherous Stuart: and that same
pride--foolish and prejudiced as the republican Armand would call
it--must have been stung to the quick on hearing of the sin which lay
at Lady Blakeney's door. She had been young, misguided, ill-advised
perhaps. Armand knew that: her impulses and imprudence, knew it
still better; but Blakeney was slow-witted, he would not listen to
"circumstances," he only clung to facts, and these had shown him Lady
Blakeney denouncing a fellow man to a tribunal that knew no pardon:
and the contempt he would feel for the deed she had done, however
unwittingly, would kill that same love in him, in which sympathy and
intellectuality could never have a part.

Yet even now, his own sister puzzled him. Life and love have such
strange vagaries. Could it be that with the waning of her husband's
love, Marguerite's heart had awakened with love for him? Strange
extremes meet in love's pathway: this woman, who had had half
intellectual Europe at her feet, might perhaps have set her affections
on a fool. Marguerite was gazing out towards the sunset. Armand could
not see her face, but presently it seemed to him that something which
glittered for a moment in the golden evening light, fell from her eyes
onto her dainty fichu of lace.

But he could not broach that subject with her. He knew her strange,
passionate nature so well, and knew that reserve which lurked behind
her frank, open ways. The had always been together, these two, for their
parents had died when Armand was still a youth, and Marguerite but a
child. He, some eight years her senior, had watched over her until her
marriage; had chaperoned her during those brilliant years spent in the
flat of the Rue de Richelieu, and had seen her enter upon this new life
of hers, here in England, with much sorrow and some foreboding.

This was his first visit to England since her marriage, and the few
months of separation had already seemed to have built up a slight, thin
partition between brother and sister; the same deep, intense love
was still there, on both sides, but each now seemed to have a secret
orchard, into which the other dared not penetrate.

There was much Armand St. Just could not tell his sister; the political
aspect of the revolution in France was changing almost every day; she
might not understand how his own views and