titude of his well-fed body. It was easy enough now to understand
the remarkable immunity which this man was enjoying, despite the many
foolhardy plots which he hatched, and which had up to now invariably
come to naught.

A regular braggart and empty windbag, he had taken but one good care,
and that was of his own skin. Unlike other less fortunate Royalists of
France, he neither fought in the country nor braved dangers in town. He
played a safer game--crossed the frontier and constituted himself agent
of Austria; he succeeded in gaining the Emperor's money for the good of
the Royalist cause, and for his own most especial benefit.

Even a less astute man of the world than was Armand St. Just would
easily have guessed that de Batz' desire to be the only instrument in
the rescue of the poor little Dauphin from the Temple was not actuated
by patriotism, but solely by greed. Obviously there was a rich reward
waiting for him in Vienna the day that he brought Louis XVII safely into
Austrian territory; that reward he would miss if a meddlesome Englishman
interfered in this affair. Whether in this wrangle he risked the life of
the child-King or not mattered to him not at all. It was de Batz who was
to get the reward, and whose welfare and prosperity mattered more than
the most precious life in Europe.

CHAPTER III. THE DEMON CHANCE

St. Just would have given much to be back in his lonely squalid lodgings
now. Too late did he realise how wise had been the dictum which had
warned him against making or renewing friendships in France.

Men had changed with the times. How terribly they had changed! Personal
safety had become a fetish with most--a goal so difficult to attain that
it had to be fought for and striven for, even at the expense of humanity
and of self-respect.

Selfishness--the mere, cold-blooded insistence for
self-advancement--ruled supreme. De Batz, surfeited with foreign money,
used it firstly to ensure his own immunity, scattering it to right and
left to still the ambition of the Public Prosecutor or to satisfy the
greed of innumerable spies.

What was left over he used for the purpose of pitting the bloodthirsty
demagogues one against the other, making of the National Assembly a
gigantic bear-den, wherein wild beasts could rend one another limb from
limb.

In the meanwhile, what cared he--he said it himself--whether hundreds
of innocent martyrs perished miserably and uselessly? They were the
necessary f