nterprise with misgiving.

The plot was to be carried out on the second night upon which Mathon was
on duty. This was the first precaution. Were he a party to
mademoiselle's escape it would be argued that he would have seized the
first opportunity; that he had not done so would go some way to prove
his innocence. On this evening, too, Mathon was particularly loud in his
hatred of all prisoners, of one emigre prisoner in particular, and his
manners were brutal. There would be many witnesses able to prove this.
In one small room at the end of a corridor he was particularly brutal.
He made the mere unlocking of the door a nerve-racking sound, and
stamped in swearing under his breath. Three women drew back into a
corner, trembling. They were women of a coarse bourgeois type, their
chief crime misfortune. They knew only imperfectly of what they were
accused, why they were there, but they had few friends to spare a
thought for them and expected each day to be their last. Sometimes they
were afraid and tearful, at other times careless, loose, and
blasphemous, despair making them unnatural, and in this mood it pleased
them to curse their fellow prisoner, also a woman, and an aristocrat.

Mathon laughed as they shrank from him.

"Disappointed again," he said. "You are not called to-night. You will
have another pleasant dream about it. Perhaps to-morrow your turn will
come. It's time. This fine apartment is wanted for better people."

Then he turned and walked towards the fourth prisoner. If she were
afraid she succeeded in hiding the fact. She was standing by the window
and she did not move.

"As for you, your time is short," said the jailer, and then coming quite
close to her he dropped his voice. "Listen, and don't show astonishment.
You will be released probably. When the time comes, ask no questions,
don't speak, do as you are told." Then he swore loudly again and,
jingling his keys, went out and locked the door.

He swore partly to keep his own courage at the proper pitch, for the
dismal corridors of the Abbaye were depressing to-night. Approaching
footsteps startled Mathon, and the sudden salutation of a comrade turned
him pale. The night was oppressive, yet he found it cold enough to make
him shiver.

Presently there came heavy footsteps, and two of those dreaded officers
of the Convention, men whose hours were occupied in spreading terror and
in feeding the guillotine, stood before him.

"Jailer Mathon?"

"Yes