being guarded, the precautions
surrounding him being even more minute than those which bad made the
unfortunate Queen's closing days a martyrdom for her.

But of Armand he could glean no satisfactory news, only the negative
probability that he was not detained in any of the larger prisons of
Paris, as no register which he, Ffoulkes, so laboriously consulted bore
record of the name of St. Just.

Haunting the restaurants and drinking booths where the most advanced
Jacobins and Terrorists were wont to meet, he had learned one or two
details of Blakeney's incarceration which he could not possibly impart
to Marguerite. The capture of the mysterious Englishman known as the
Scarlet Pimpernel had created a great deal of popular satisfaction;
but it was obvious that not only was the public mind not allowed to
associate that capture with the escape of little Capet from the Temple,
but it soon became clear to Ffoulkes that the news of that escape was
still being kept a profound secret.

On one occasion he had succeeded in spying on the Chief Agent of the
Committee of General Security, whom he knew by sight, while the latter
was sitting at dinner in the company of a stout, florid man with
pock-marked face and podgy hands covered with rings.

Sir Andrew marvelled who this man might be. Heron spoke to him in
ambiguous phrases that would have been unintelligible to any one who did
not know the circumstances of the Dauphin's escape and the part that
the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel had played in it. But to Sir Andrew
Ffoulkes, who--cleverly disguised as a farrier, grimy after his day's
work--was straining his ears to listen whilst apparently consuming huge
slabs of boiled beef, it soon became dear that the chief agent and his
fat friend were talking of the Dauphin and of Blakeney.

"He won't hold out much longer, citizen," the chief agent was saying in
a confident voice; "our men are absolutely unremitting in their task.
Two of them watch him night and day; they look after him well, and
practically never lose sight of him, but the moment he tries to get any
sleep one of them rushes into the cell with a loud banging of bayonet
and sabre, and noisy tread on the flagstones, and shouts at the top of
his voice: 'Now then, aristo, where's the brat? Tell us now, and you
shall be down and go to sleep.' I have done it myself all through one
day just for the pleasure of it. It's a little tiring for you to have to
shout a good deal now, a