e,
mademoiselle, to pay--"

"To pay your surplus of compliments, monsieur le Gouverneur. I could not
help but hear something of what you said," responded Marie, and gave her
hand to Tryon.

"I leave you to mademoiselle's tender mercies, monsieur," said the
Governor. "Au revoir!"

When he had gone, Hugh said: "You are gay today."

"Indeed, no, I am sad."

"Wherefore sad? Is nickel proving a drug? Or sugar a failure? Don't tell
me that your father says sugar is falling." He glanced at the letter,
which she unconsciously held in her hand.

She saw his look, smoothed the letter a little nervously between her
palms, and put it into her pocket, saying: "No, my father has not
said that sugar is falling--but come here, will you?" and she motioned
towards the open window. When there, she said slowly, "That is what
makes me sad and sorry," and she pointed to the Semaphore upon the Hill
of Pains.

"You are too tender-hearted," he remarked. "A convict has escaped; he
will be caught perhaps--perhaps not; and things will go on as before."

"Will go on as before. That is, the 'martinet' worse than the 'knout de
Russe'; the 'poucettes', the 'crapaudine' on neck and ankles and wrists;
all, all as bad as the 'Pater Noster' of the Inquisition, as Mayer
said the other day in the face of Charpentier, the Commandant of the
penitentiary. How pleasant also to think of the Boulevard de Guillotine!
I tell you it is brutal, horrible. Think of what prisoners have to
suffer here, whose only crime is that they were of the Commune; that
they were just a little madder than other Frenchmen."

"Pardon me if I say that as brutal things were done by the English in
Tasmania."

"Think of two hundred and sixty strokes of the 'cat.'"

"You concern yourself too much about these things, I fear."

"I only think that death would be easier than the life of half of the
convicts here."

"They themselves would prefer it, perhaps."

"Tell me, who is the convict that has escaped?" she feverishly asked.
"Is it a political prisoner?"

"You would not know him. He was one of the Commune who escaped shooting
in the Place de la Concorde. Carbourd, I think, was his name."

"Carbourd, Carbourd," she repeated, and turned her head away towards the
Semaphore.

Her earnestness aroused in Tryon a sudden flame of sympathy which had
its origin, as he well knew, in three years of growing love. This love
leaped up now determinedly--perhaps unwisely; but what shou