their eyes fixed on the leader, lest one single word from him
should fail to reach their ears.

The full magnetism of the man was apparent now. As he held these
four men at this moment, he could have held a crowd. The man of the
world--the fastidious dandy--had shed his mask; there stood the leader,
calm, serene in the very face of the most deadly danger that had ever
encompassed any man, looking that danger fully in the face, not striving
to belittle it or to exaggerate it, but weighing it in the balance with
what there was to accomplish: the rescue of a martyred, innocent child
from the hands of fiends who were destroying his very soul even more
completely than his body.

"Everything, I think, is prepared," resumed Sir Percy after a slight
pause. "The Simons have been summarily dismissed; I learned that to-day.
They remove from the Temple on Sunday next, the nineteenth. Obviously
that is the one day most likely to help us in our operations. As far
as I am concerned, I cannot make any hard-and-fast plans. Chance at the
last moment will have to dictate. But from every one of you I must
have co-operation, and it can only be by your following my directions
implicitly that we can even remotely hope to succeed."

He crossed and recrossed the room once or twice before he spoke again,
pausing now and again in his walk in front of a large map of Paris and
its environs that hung upon the wall, his tall figure erect, his hands
behind his back, his eyes fixed before him as if he saw right through
the walls of this squalid room, and across the darkness that overhung
the city, through the grim bastions of the mighty building far away,
where the descendant of an hundred kings lived at the mercy of human
fiends who worked for his abasement.

The man's face now was that of a seer and a visionary; the firm lines
were set and rigid as those of an image carved in stone--the statue of
heart-whole devotion, with the self-imposed task beckoning sternly to
follow, there where lurked danger and death.

"The way, I think, in which we could best succeed would be this," he
resumed after a while, sitting now on the edge of the table and directly
facing his four friends. The light from the lamp which stood upon the
table behind him fell full upon those four glowing faces fixed eagerly
upon him, but he himself was in shadow, a massive silhouette broadly cut
out against the light-coloured map on the wall beyond.

"I remain here, of course, un