e directed at the
absent friend, "he won't trust me even now. He won't trust his Jeanne in
my hands. Well," he added after a while, "after all, I would not entrust
Marguerite to anybody else either."

CHAPTER XXIII. THE OVERWHELMING ODDS

At half-past ten that same evening, Blakeney, still clad in a workman's
tattered clothes, his feet Bare so that he could tread the streets
unheard, turned into the Rue de la Croix Blanche.

The porte-cochere of the house where Armand lodged had been left on the
latch; not a soul was in sight. Peering cautiously round, he slipped
into the house. On the ledge of the window, immediately on his left when
he entered, a candle was left burning, and beside it there was a scrap
of paper with the initials S. P. roughly traced in pencil. No one
challenged him as he noiselessly glided past it, and up the narrow
stairs that led to the upper floor. Here, too, on the second landing
the door on the right had been left on the latch. He pushed it open and
entered.

As is usual even in the meanest lodgings in Paris houses, a small
antechamber gave between the front door and the main room. When Percy
entered the antechamber was unlighted, but the door into the inner room
beyond was ajar. Blakeney approached it with noiseless tread, and gently
pushed it open.

That very instant he knew that the game was up; he heard the footsteps
closing up behind him, saw Armand, deathly pale, leaning against the
wall in the room in front of him, and Chauvelin and Heron standing guard
over him.

The next moment the room and the antechamber were literally alive with
soldiers--twenty of them to arrest one man.

It was characteristic of that man that when hands were laid on him
from every side he threw back his head and laughed--laughed mirthfully,
light-heartedly, and the first words that escaped his lips were:

"Well, I am d--d!"

"The odds are against you, Sir Percy," said Chauvelin to him in
English, whilst Heron at the further end of the room was growling like a
contented beast.

"By the Lord, sir," said Percy with perfect sang-froid, "I do believe
that for the moment they are."

"Have done, my men--have done!" he added, turning good-humouredly to the
soldiers round him. "I never fight against overwhelming odds. Twenty to
one, eh? I could lay four of you out easily enough, perhaps even six,
but what then?"

But a kind of savage lust seemed to have rendered these men temporarily
mad, and they were b