browbeat him into giving up the
lodger's letter, and finally pressed a piece of gold into his hand. The
workman was Blakeney, of course. I imagine that Armand, at the time that
he wrote the letter, must have been under the belief that Mademoiselle
Lange was still in prison; he could not know then that Blakeney had
already got her into comparative safety. In the letter he must have
spoken of the terrible plight in which he stood, and also of his fears
for the woman whom he loved. Percy was not the man to leave a comrade
in the lurch! He would not be the man whom we all love and admire, whose
word we all obey, for whose sake we would gladly all of us give our
life--he would not be that man if he did not brave even certain dangers
in order to be of help to those who call on him. Armand called and Percy
went to him. He must have known that Armand was being spied upon, for
Armand, alas! was already a marked man, and the watch-dogs of
those infernal committees were already on his heels. Whether these
sleuth-hounds had followed the son of the concierge and seen him give
the letter to the workman in the Rue St. Germain l'Auxerrois, or whether
the concierge in the Rue de la Croix Blanche was nothing but a spy of
Heron's, or, again whether the Committee of General Security kept
a company of soldiers in constant alert in that house, we shall, of
course, never know. All that I do know is that Percy entered that
fatal house at half-past ten, and that a quarter of an hour later the
concierge saw some of the soldiers descending the stairs, carrying
a heavy burden. She peeped out of her lodge, and by the light in the
corridor she saw that the heavy burden was the body of a man bound
closely with ropes: his eyes were closed, his clothes were stained with
blood. He was seemingly unconscious. The next day the official organ
of the Government proclaimed the capture of the Scarlet Pimpernel, and
there was a public holiday in honour of the event."

Marguerite had listened to this terrible narrative dry-eyed and silent.
Now she still sat there, hardly conscious of what went on around her--of
Suzanne's tears, that fell unceasingly upon her fingers--of Sir Andrew,
who had sunk into a chair, and buried his head in his hands. She was
hardly conscious that she lived; the universe seemed to have stood still
before this awful, monstrous cataclysm.

But, nevertheless, she was the first to return to the active realities
of the present.

"Sir Andrew