foiled by him.

Four months had gone by since that day, and the Scarlet Pimpernel
was hardly ever out of France now; the massacres in Paris and in the
provinces had multiplied with appalling rapidity, the necessity for the
selfless devotion of that small band of heroes had become daily, hourly
more pressing. They rallied round their chief with unbounded enthusiasm,
and let it be admitted at once that the sporting instinct--inherent in
these English gentlemen--made them all the more keen, all the more
eager now that the dangers which beset their expeditions were increased
tenfold.

At a word from the beloved leader, these young men--the spoilt darlings
of society--would leave the gaieties, the pleasures, the luxuries of
London or of Bath, and, taking their lives in their hands, they placed
them, together with their fortunes, and even their good names, at the
service of the innocent and helpless victims of merciless tyranny. The
married men--Ffoulkes, my Lord Hastings, Sir Jeremiah Wallescourt--left
wife and children at a call from the chief, at the cry of the wretched.
Armand--unattached and enthusiastic--had the right to demand that he
should no longer be left behind.

He had only been away a little over fifteen months, and yet he found
Paris a different city from the one he had left immediately after the
terrible massacres of September. An air of grim loneliness seemed to
hang over her despite the crowds that thronged her streets; the men whom
he was wont to meet in public places fifteen months ago--friends and
political allies--were no longer to be seen; strange faces surrounded
him on every side--sullen, glowering faces, all wearing a certain air of
horrified surprise and of vague, terrified wonder, as if life had
become one awful puzzle, the answer to which must be found in the brief
interval between the swift passages of death.

Armand St. Just, having settled his few simple belongings in the squalid
lodgings which had been assigned to him, had started out after dark to
wander somewhat aimlessly through the streets. Instinctively he seemed
to be searching for a familiar face, some one who would come to him out
of that merry past which he had spent with Marguerite in their pretty
apartment in the Rue St. Honore.

For an hour he wandered thus and met no one whom he knew. At times it
appeared to him as if he did recognise a face or figure that passed him
swiftly by in the gloom, but even before he could fully m