claimed the rise of the curtain. The growing impatience of the
audience subsided as if by magic at the welcome call; everybody settled
down again comfortably in their seats, they gave up the contemplation of
the fathers of the people, and turned their full attention to the actors
on the boards.

CHAPTER II. WIDELY DIVERGENT AIMS

This was Armand S. Just's first visit to Paris since that memorable day
when first he decided to sever his connection from the Republican party,
of which he and his beautiful sister Marguerite had at one time been
amongst the most noble, most enthusiastic followers. Already a year and
a half ago the excesses of the party had horrified him, and that was
long before they had degenerated into the sickening orgies which were
culminating to-day in wholesale massacres and bloody hecatombs of
innocent victims.

With the death of Mirabeau the moderate Republicans, whose sole and
entirely pure aim had been to free the people of France from the
autocratic tyranny of the Bourbons, saw the power go from their clean
hands to the grimy ones of lustful demagogues, who knew no law save
their own passions of bitter hatred against all classes that were not as
self-seeking, as ferocious as themselves.

It was no longer a question of a fight for political and religious
liberty only, but one of class against class, man against man, and
let the weaker look to himself. The weaker had proved himself to
be, firstly, the man of property and substance, then the law-abiding
citizen, lastly the man of action who had obtained for the people that
very same liberty of thought and of belief which soon became so terribly
misused.

Armand St. Just, one of the apostles of liberty, fraternity, and
equality, soon found that the most savage excesses of tyranny were being
perpetrated in the name of those same ideals which he had worshipped.

His sister Marguerite, happily married in England, was the final
temptation which caused him to quit the country the destinies of which
he no longer could help to control. The spark of enthusiasm which he
and the followers of Mirabeau had tried to kindle in the hearts of an
oppressed people had turned to raging tongues of unquenchable flames.
The taking of the Bastille had been the prelude to the massacres of
September, and even the horror of these had since paled beside the
holocausts of to-day.

Armand, saved from the swift vengeance of the revolutionaries by the
devotion of the Sc