"Marie, you promised to help me."

"I meant it. What can I do, mademoiselle?"

Jeanne gave the girl minute instructions for finding the house in which
the Marquis de Lafayette had his apartment, and Marie showed little sign
of weak-mindedness as she listened.

"I know the house, mademoiselle."

"Go there, say you come from me and ask to see him. Give him this letter
and ask him to see that it is safely delivered."

"And if he is away, mademoiselle?"

"Then ask his servant to tell you where the man to whom this letter is
addressed lives."

"And if he does not know?"

"Ah, Marie, I cannot tell what you are to do then. Take the letter, hide
it away. Heaven grant it reaches its destination."

Marie stood with the letter in her hand.

"Who's it to? I cannot read, mademoiselle, but if I know the name, I may
find him even if the servant doesn't know."

"It is addressed to Monsieur Richard Barrington," said Jeanne.

The girl put the letter into her pocket, and patted her dress to
emphasize the security of the hiding-place.

"I'll go to-morrow. I have a holiday all day; that gives me plenty of
time to find the man who loves mademoiselle. Richard Barrington; I shall
not forget the name."

"Not my lover, Marie."

"Ah, mademoiselle, why pretend with me? Yours is not the first secret I
have kept."

CHAPTER XIX

CITIZEN SABATIER TURNS TRAITOR

The Rue Charonne in the neighborhood of the Chat Rouge was a busy
street. Its importance as a business quarter had been on the increase
for some years, yet in the adjoining back streets extreme poverty
existed and there were warrens of iniquity into which the law had feared
to penetrate too deeply. It was an old part of the city, too, built on
land once belonging to a monastery whose memory was still kept alive by
the names of mean streets and alleys into which byways respectable
citizens did not go. There were stories current of men who had ventured
and had never come forth again. With some of the inhabitants, it was
asserted, the attainment of an almost worthless trinket, or a single
coin, or even a garment, was considered cheap as the price of murder;
and so intricate were the streets, so honeycombed with secret
hiding-places known only to the initiated, that attempts to enforce
justice had almost invariably ended in failure. Naturally this squalid
neighborhood materially swelled the yelling crowds who, in the name of
patriotism, openly defied all law and ord