he could do, or any
message that she could take to the others. Of hope she had none. The
last lingering ray of it had been extinguished by that fiend when he
said, "We need not fear that he will escape. I doubt if he could walk
very steadily across this room now."

CHAPTER XXVII. IN THE CONCIERGERIE

Marguerite, accompanied by Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, walked rapidly along
the quay. It lacked ten minutes to the half hour; the night was dark and
bitterly cold. Snow was still falling in sparse, thin flakes, and lay
like a crisp and glittering mantle over the parapets of the bridges and
the grim towers of the Chatelet prison.

They walked on silently now. All that they had wanted to say to one
another had been said inside the squalid room of their lodgings when Sir
Andrew Ffoulkes had come home and learned that Chauvelin had been.

"They are killing him by inches, Sir Andrew," had been the heartrending
cry which burst from Marguerite's oppressed heart as soon as her hands
rested in the kindly ones of her best friend. "Is there aught that we
can do?"

There was, of course, very little that could be done. One or two fine
steel files which Sir Andrew gave her to conceal beneath the folds of
her kerchief; also a tiny dagger with sharp, poisoned blade, which for a
moment she held in her hand hesitating, her eyes filling with tears, her
heart throbbing with unspeakable sorrow.

Then slowly--very slowly--she raised the small, death-dealing instrument
to her lips, and reverently kissed the narrow blade.

"If it must be!" she murmured, "God in His mercy will forgive!"

She sheathed the dagger, and this, too, she hid in the folds of her
gown.

"Can you think of anything else, Sir Andrew, that he might want?" she
asked. "I have money in plenty, in case those soldiers--"

Sir Andrew sighed, and turned away from her so as to hide the
hopelessness which he felt. Since three days now he had been exhausting
every conceivable means of getting at the prison guard with bribery
and corruption. But Chauvelin and his friends had taken excellent
precautions. The prison of the Conciergerie, situated as it was in the
very heart of the labyrinthine and complicated structure of the Chatelet
and the house of Justice, and isolated from every other group of cells
in the building, was inaccessible save from one narrow doorway which
gave on the guard-room first, and thence on the inner cell beyond. Just
as all attempts to rescue the late unfor