ther, and tell your lodger that a big,
rough man took the letter away from you by force. Now run, before I kick
you out of the way."

The lad, terrified out of his poor wits, did not wait for further
commands; he took to his heels and ran, his small hand clutching the
piece of gold. Soon he had disappeared round the corner of the street.

Blakeney did not at once read the paper; he thrust it quickly into his
breeches pocket and slouched away slowly down the street, and thence
across the Place du Carrousel, in the direction of his new lodgings in
the Rue de l'Arcade.

It was only when he found himself alone in the narrow, squalid room
which he was occupying that he took the scrap of paper from his pocket
and read it slowly through. It said:

Percy, you cannot forgive me, nor can I ever forgive myself, but if you
only knew what I have suffered for the past two days you would, I think,
try and forgive. I am free and yet a prisoner; my every footstep is
dogged. What they ultimately mean to do with me I do not know. And
when I think of Jeanne I long for the power to end mine own miserable
existence. Percy! she is still in the hands of those fiends.... I saw
the prison register; her name written there has been like a burning
brand on my heart ever since. She was still in prison the day that you
left Paris; to-morrow, to-night mayhap, they will try her, condemn her,
torture her, and I dare not go to see you, for I would only be bringing
spies to your door. But will you come to me, Percy? It should be safe in
the hours of the night, and the concierge is devoted to me. To-night at
ten o'clock she will leave the porte-cochere unlatched. If you find it
so, and if on the ledge of the window immediately on your left as you
enter you find a candle alight, and beside it a scrap of paper with your
initials S. P. traced on it, then it will be quite safe for you to come
up to my room. It is on the second landing--a door on your right--that
too I will leave on the latch. But in the name of the woman you love
best in all the world come at once to me then, and hear in mind, Percy,
that the woman I love is threatened with immediate death, and that I am
powerless to save her. Indeed, believe me, I would gladly die even now
hut for the thought of Jeanne, whom I should be leaving in the hands
of those fiends. For God's sake, Percy, remember that Jeanne is all the
world to me.

"Poor old Armand," murmured Blakeney with a kindly smil