fuge behind Pierre. Jacques pushed
the hag aside, saying savagely: "Let me look after this!"

Each brother stripped off his coat, holding it as a buckler whilst the
right hand gripped a knife.

"You are right, Jacques," said the frenzied cripple. "We Frochards
come of a race that kills!"

The adversaries feinted around each other in circles, in the Latin
mode of fighting that was their heritage. Coats or sidesteps parried
or evaded blows. The knives gleamed, but did not go quickly home.

If Jacques had the superior strength, Pierre was the more cat-like.
His frail body was a slight target, so that the other's great lunges
missed. Then, leaping like a puma, he was behind and under Jacques'
guard, and stabbed him in the back.

The great hulk of a man fell back into La Frochard's arms, the blood
oozing from a cut that was not mortal though fearsome. The hag-mother
wailed and crooned as if he were in death agony.

"Quick!" cried the hunchback to Louise, "the road to liberty is open."
Taking Louise by the hand, he ran with her up the steps out of the
cellar....

But Henriette did not meet--not until one fateful hour--the itinerant
grinder and her loved sister whom he protected. They were in many of
the scenes of the later Revolution. Louise ate off the de Vaudrey
plate, and Pierre perforce sharpened the knives of the September
Massacre. Tramps of the boiling, tempestuous City, spectators but not
participants of the great events, they looked ceaselessly for her.

Nor did the wicked Frochards abide in the den of Louise's imprisonment
and sufferings. They too were swallowed up in the vast maelstrom--to
reappear at one ludicrous moment of tragic times.

CHAPTER XX

THE NEW TYRANNY

Before telling you how the Chevalier de Vaudrey got out of Caen and
how he fared forth to his love, it is meet that the reader should
understand the rapidly changing conditions that converted the New
France into a veritable Hell on earth.

After the Fall of the Bastille, and even after the mob's sortie on
Versailles which enforced the royal family's return to Paris where
they lived in the Tuileries, it was the hope of the moderate patriots
that constitutional monarchy might prevail.

These hopes were dashed, first, by royalty's intrigues and double-dealing,
and, secondly, through the pressure of the revolting emigres and the
threat of foreign invasion that welded all the defenders of France,
willy-nilly, into a traitor-crushin