o matter what you would have done!" Tavannes said. "Suffice it that
she would have answered as you suggest. Yet to-day she has given me her
promise."

"Yes," the young man retorted, "in circumstances in which no man of
honour--"

"Let us say in peculiar circumstances."

"Well?"

"Which still exist! Mark me, M. de Tignonville," Count Hannibal
continued, leaning forward and eyeing the young man with meaning, "_which
still exist_! And may have the same effect on another's will as on hers!
Listen! Do you hear?" And rising from his seat with a darkening face,
he pointed to the partly shuttered window, through which the measured
tramp of a body of men came heavily to the ear. "Do you hear, Monsieur?
Do you understand? As it was yesterday it is to-day! They killed the
President La Place this morning! And they are searching! They are still
searching! The river is not yet full, nor the gibbet glutted! I have
but to open that window and denounce you, and your life would hang by no
stronger thread than the life of a mad dog which they chase through the
streets!"

The younger man had risen also. He stood confronting Tavannes, the cowl
fallen back from his face, his eyes dilated.

"You think to frighten me!" he cried. "You think that I am craven enough
to sacrifice her to save myself. You--"

"You were craven enough to draw back yesterday, when you stood at this
window and waited for death!" Count Hannibal answered brutally. "You
flinched then, and may flinch again!"

"Try me!" Tignonville retorted, trembling with passion. "Try me!" And
then, as the other stared at him and made no movement, "But you dare
not!" he cried. "You dare not!"

"No?"

"No! For if I die you lose her!" Tignonville replied in a voice of
triumph. "Ha, ha! I touch you there!" he continued. "You dare not, for
my safety is part of the price, and is more to you than it is to myself!
You may threaten, M. de Tavannes, you may bluster, and shout and point to
the window"--and he mocked, with a disdainful mimicry, the other's
gesture--"but my safety is more to you than to me! And 'twill end
there!"

"You believe that?"

"I know it!"

In two strides Count Hannibal was at the window. He seized a great piece
of the boarding which closed one-half of the opening; he wrenched it
away. A flood of evening light burst in through the aperture, and fell
on and heightened the flushed passion of his features, as he turned again
to his op