n
writhed as he remembered its terrific purport.

"Though my heart was racked with agony, and I would have died, ay,
cheerfully" (died, indeed, as if THAT were a penalty!) "to spare yonder
lovely child a pang, I said to her calmly, 'Blanche de Bechamel, did
Goby de Mouchy tell you secret NUMBER THREE?'

"She whispered a oui that was quite faint, faint and small. But her poor
father fell in convulsions at her feet.

"She died suddenly that night. Did I not tell you those I love come to
no good? When General Bonaparte crossed the Saint Bernard, he saw in the
convent an old monk with a white beard, wandering about the corridors,
cheerful and rather stout, but mad--mad as a March hare. 'General,' I
said to him, 'did you ever see that face before?' He had not. He had
not mingled much with the higher classes of our society before the
Revolution. I knew the poor old man well enough; he was the last of a
noble race, and I loved his child."

"And did she die by--?"

"Man! did I say so? Do I whisper the secrets of the Vehmgericht? I
say she died that night: and he--he, the heartless, the villain, the
betrayer,--you saw him seated in yonder curiosity-shop, by yonder
guillotine, with his scoundrelly head in his lap.

"You saw how slight that instrument was? It was one of the first which
Guillotin made, and which he showed to private friends in a HANGAR
in the Rue Picpus, where he lived. The invention created some little
conversation amongst scientific men at the time, though I remember a
machine in Edinburgh of a very similar construction, two hundred--well,
many, many years ago--and at a breakfast which Guillotin gave he showed
us the instrument, and much talk arose amongst us as to whether people
suffered under it.

"And now I must tell you what befell the traitor who had caused all this
suffering. Did he know that the poor child's death was a SENTENCE? He
felt a cowardly satisfaction that with her was gone the secret of
his treason. Then he began to doubt. I had MEANS to penetrate all his
thoughts, as well as to know his acts. Then he became a slave to a
horrible fear. He fled in abject terror to a convent. They still existed
in Paris; and behind the walls of Jacobins the wretch thought himself
secure. Poor fool! I had but to set one of my somnambulists to sleep.
Her spirit went forth and spied the shuddering wretch in his cell. She
described the street, the gate, the convent, the very dress which he
wore, and which you