tired and hungry, but fortunately not very far from that
quarter of Paris where food is easily obtainable.

He was somewhere near the Madeleine--a quarter he knew well. Soon he
saw in front of him a small eating-house which looked fairly clean and
orderly. He pushed open its swing-door, and seeing an empty table in a
secluded part of the room, he sat down and ordered some supper.

The place made no impression upon his memory. He could not have told
you an hour later where it was situated, who had served him, what he had
eaten, or what other persons were present in the dining-room at the time
that he himself entered it.

Having eaten, however, he felt more like his normal self--more conscious
of his actions. When he finally left the eating-house, he realised, for
instance, that it was very cold--a fact of which he had for the past few
hours been totally unaware. The snow was falling in thin close flakes,
and a biting north-easterly wind was blowing those flakes into his face
and down his collar. He wrapped his cloak tightly around him. It was
a good step yet to Blakeney's lodgings, where he knew that he was
expected.

He struck quickly into the Rue St. Honore, avoiding the great open
places where the grim horrors of this magnificent city in revolt against
civilisation were displayed in all their grim nakedness--on the Place
de la Revolution the guillotine, on the Carrousel the open-air camps of
workers under the lash of slave-drivers more cruel than the uncivilised
brutes of the Far West.

And Armand had to think of Jeanne in the midst of all these horrors. She
was still a petted actress to-day, but who could tell if on the morrow
the terrible law of the "suspect" would not reach her in order to drag
her before a tribunal that knew no mercy, and whose sole justice was a
condemnation?

The young man hurried on; he was anxious to be among his own comrades,
to hear his chief's pleasant voice, to feel assured that by all the
sacred laws of friendship Jeanne henceforth would become the special
care of the Scarlet Pimpernel and his league.

Blakeney lodged in a small house situated on the Quai de l'Ecole, at
the back of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, from whence he had a clear and
uninterrupted view across the river, as far as the irregular block of
buildings of the Chatelet prison and the house of Justice.

The same tower-clock that two centuries ago had tolled the signal for
the massacre of the Huguenots was even now str