that partition, and no one was allowed to
come too near to him. Thus the fraud was succeeding fairly well. Heron
and his accomplices only cared to save their skins, and the wretched
little substitute being really ill, they firmly hoped that he would
soon die, when no doubt they would bruit abroad the news of the death of
Capet, which would relieve them of further responsibility.

That such ideas, such thoughts, such schemes should have engendered in
human minds it is almost impossible to conceive, and yet we know from
no less important a witness than Madame Simon herself that the child who
died in the Temple a few weeks later was a poor little imbecile, a deaf
and dumb child brought hither from one of the asylums and left to die in
peace. There was nobody but kindly Death to take him out of his misery,
for the giant intellect that had planned and carried out the rescue of
the uncrowned King of France, and which alone might have had the power
to save him too, was being broken on the rack of enforced sleeplessness.

CHAPTER XXVI. THE BITTEREST FOE

That same evening Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, having announced his intention
of gleaning further news of Armand, if possible, went out shortly after
seven o'clock, promising to be home again about nine.

Marguerite, on the other hand, had to make her friend a solemn promise
that she would try and eat some supper which the landlady of these
miserable apartments had agreed to prepare for her. So far they had been
left in peaceful occupation of these squalid lodgings in a tumble-down
house on the Quai de la Ferraille, facing the house of Justice, the grim
walls of which Marguerite would watch with wide-open dry eyes for as
long as the grey wintry light lingered over them.

Even now, though the darkness had set in, and snow, falling in close,
small flakes, threw a thick white veil over the landscape, she sat at
the open window long after Sir Andrew had gone out, watching the few
small flicks of light that blinked across from the other side of the
river, and which came from the windows of the Chatelet towers. The
windows of the Conciergerie she could not see, for these gave on one of
the inner courtyards; but there was a melancholy consolation even in the
gazing on those walls that held in their cruel, grim embrace all that
she loved in the world.

It seemed so impossible to think of Percy--the laughter-loving,
irresponsible, light-hearted adventurer--as the prey of those fiends