have no news of you or of the expedition, I will slowly
work southwards in the direction of the Chateau d'Ourde. That is all
that I can do. If you can contrive to let Percy or even Armand know my
movements, do so by all means. I know that I shall be doing right, for,
in a way, I shall be watching over you and arranging for your safety, as
Blakeney begged me to do. God bless you, Lady Blakeney, and God save the
Scarlet Pimpernel!"

He stooped and kissed her hand, and she intimated to the officer that
she was ready. He had a hackney coach waiting for her lower down the
street. To it she walked with a firm step, and as she entered it she
waved a last farewell to Sir Andrew Ffoulkes.

CHAPTER XLII. THE GUARD-HOUSE OF THE RUE STE. ANNE

The little cortege was turning out of the great gates of the house of
Justice. It was intensely cold; a bitter north-easterly gale was blowing
from across the heights of Montmartre, driving sleet and snow and
half-frozen rain into the faces of the men, and finding its way up their
sleeves, down their collars and round the knees of their threadbare
breeches.

Armand, whose fingers were numb with the cold, could scarcely feel the
reins in his hands. Chauvelin was riding dose beside him, but the two
men had not exchanged one word since the moment when the small troop
of some twenty mounted soldiers had filed up inside the courtyard, and
Chauvelin, with a curt word of command, had ordered one of the troopers
to take Armand's horse on the lead.

A hackney coach brought up the rear of the cortege, with a man riding
at either door and two more following at a distance of twenty paces.
Heron's gaunt, ugly face, crowned with a battered, sugar-loaf hat,
appeared from time to time at the window of the coach. He was no
horseman, and, moreover, preferred to keep the prisoner closely under
his own eye. The corporal had told Armand that the prisoner was with
citizen Heron inside the coach--in irons. Beyond that the soldiers could
tell him nothing; they knew nothing of the object of this expedition.
Vaguely they might have wondered in their dull minds why this particular
prisoner was thus being escorted out of the Conciergerie prison with so
much paraphernalia and such an air of mystery, when there were thousands
of prisoners in the city and the provinces at the present moment who
anon would be bundled up wholesale into carts to be dragged to the
guillotine like a flock of sheep to the butchers.