as close on midnight now, and still they sat opposite one another,
he the friend and she the wife, talking over that brief half-hour that
had meant an eternity to her.

Marguerite had tried to tell Sir Andrew everything; bitter as it was to
put into actual words the pathos and misery which she had witnessed,
yet she would hide nothing from the devoted comrade whom she knew Percy
would trust absolutely. To him she repeated every word that Percy had
uttered, described every inflection of his voice, those enigmatical
phrases which she had not understood, and together they cheated one
another into the belief that hope lingered somewhere hidden in those
words.

"I am not going to despair, Lady Blakeney," said Sir Andrew firmly;
"and, moreover, we are not going to disobey. I would stake my life that
even now Blakeney has some scheme in his mind which is embodied in the
various letters which he has given you, and which--Heaven help us
in that case!--we might thwart by disobedience. Tomorrow in the late
afternoon I will escort you to the Rue de Charonne. It is a house that
we all know well, and which Armand, of course, knows too. I had already
inquired there two days ago to ascertain whether by chance St. Just was
not in hiding there, but Lucas, the landlord and old-clothes dealer,
knew nothing about him."

Marguerite told him about her swift vision of Armand in the dark
corridor of the house of Justice.

"Can you understand it, Sir Andrew?" she asked, fixing her deep,
luminous eyes inquiringly upon him.

"No, I cannot," he said, after an almost imperceptible moment of
hesitancy; "but we shall see him to-morrow. I have no doubt that
Mademoiselle Lange will know where to find him; and now that we know
where she is, all our anxiety about him, at any rate, should soon be at
an end."

He rose and made some allusion to the lateness of the hour. Somehow it
seemed to her that her devoted friend was trying to hide his innermost
thoughts from her. She watched him with an anxious, intent gaze.

"Can you understand it all, Sir Andrew?" she reiterated with a pathetic
note of appeal.

"No, no!" he said firmly. "On my soul, Lady Blakeney, I know no more of
Armand than you do yourself. But I am sure that Percy is right. The boy
frets because remorse must have assailed him by now. Had he but obeyed
implicitly that day, as we all did--"

But he could not frame the whole terrible proposition in words. Bitterly
as he himself felt on t