itizen-aristocrat."

Ombreval set his teeth and clenched his hands.

"Canaille!" he snarled, in his fury.

"Hold!" Caron called after the departing men.

They obeyed, and now this wretched Vicomte, of such unstable spirit
dropped all his anger again, as suddenly as he had caught it up. Fear
paled his cheek and palsied his limbs once more, for La Boulaye's
expression was very terrible.

"You know what I said that I would have done to you if you used that
word again?" La Boulaye questioned him coldly.

"I--I was beside myself, Monsieur," the other gasped, in the intensity
of his fear. And at the sight of his pitiable condition the anger fell
away from La Boulaye, and he smiled scornfully.

"My faith," he sneered. "You are hot one moment and cold the next.
Citizen, I am afraid that you are no better than a vulgar coward. Take
him away," he ended, waving his hand towards the door, and as he watched
them leading him out he reflected bitterly that this was the man to whom
Suzanne was betrothed--the man whom, not a doubt of it, she loved, since
for him she had stooped so low. This miserable craven she preferred to
him, because the man, so ignoble of nature, was noble by the accident of
birth.

PART III. THE EVERLASTING RULE

Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,
And men below and saints above,
For love is Heaven and Heaven is love.

--The Lay of the Last Minstrel.

CHAPTER XVI. CECILE DESHAIX. In his lodgings at the corner of the
Rue-St. Honore and the Rue de la Republique--lately changed, in the
all-encompassing metamorphosis, from "Rue Royale" sat the Deputy Caron
La Boulaye at his writing-table.

There was a flush on his face and a sparkle in the eyes that looked
pensively before him what time he gnawed the feathered end of his quill.
In his ears still rang the acclamations that had greeted his brilliant
speech in the Assembly that day. He was of the party of the Mountain--as
was but natural in a protege of the Seagreen Robespierre--a party more
famed for its directness of purpose than elegance of expression, and in
its ranks there was room and to spare for such orators as he. The season
was March of '93--a season marked by the deadly feud raging 'twixt the
Girondins and the Mountain, and in that battle of tongues La Boulaye
was covering himself with glory and doing credit to his patron, the
Incorruptible. He was of a rhetoric not inferior to Vergniaud's--that
most eloquent Giron