y, and then gathered her trembling chicks
under her wing, trying to look defiant.

In a moment she was surrounded. Two soldiers seized her, and two more
dragged the children away from her. She screamed and the children cried,
the soldiers swore and struck out right and left with their bayonets.
There was a general melee, calls of agony rent the air, rough oaths
drowned the shouts of the helpless. Some women, panic-stricken, started
to run.

And Blakeney from his window looked down upon the scene. He no longer
saw the garden at Richmond, the lazily-flowing river, the bowers of
roses; even the sweet face of Marguerite, sad and lonely, appeared dim
and far away.

He looked across the ice-bound river, past the quay where rough soldiers
were brutalising a number of wretched defenceless women, to that grim
Chatelet prison, where tiny lights shining here and there behind barred
windows told the sad tale of weary vigils, of watches through the night,
when dawn would bring martyrdom and death.

And it was not Marguerite's blue eyes that beckoned to him now, it was
not her lips that called, but the wan face of a child with matted curls
hanging above a greasy forehead, and small hands covered in grime that
had once been fondled by a Queen.

The adventurer in him had chased away the dream.

"While there is life in me I'll cheat those brutes of prey," he
murmured.

CHAPTER XIII. THEN EVERYTHING WAS DARK

The night that Armand St. Just spent tossing about on a hard, narrow bed
was the most miserable, agonising one he had ever passed in his life.
A kind of fever ran through him, causing his teeth to chatter and the
veins in his temples to throb until he thought that they must burst.

Physically he certainly was ill; the mental strain caused by two great
conflicting passions had attacked his bodily strength, and whilst his
brain and heart fought their battles together, his aching limbs found no
repose.

His love for Jeanne! His loyalty to the man to whom he owed his life,
and to whom he had sworn allegiance and implicit obedience!

These superacute feelings seemed to be tearing at his very heartstrings,
until he felt that he could no longer lie on the miserable palliasse
which in these squalid lodgings did duty for a bed.

He rose long before daybreak, with tired back and burning eyes, but
unconscious of any pain save that which tore at his heart.

The weather, fortunately, was not quite so cold--a sudden and very r