equality, soon found that the most savage excesses of tyranny were
being perpetrated in the name of those same ideals which he had
worshipped.

His sister Marguerite, happily married in England, was the final
temptation which caused him to quit the country the destinies of
which he no longer could help to control. The spark of enthusiasm
which he and the followers of Mirabeau had tried to kindle in the
hearts of an oppressed people had turned to raging tongues of
unquenchable flames. The taking of the Bastille had been the
prelude to the massacres of September, and even the horror of
these had since paled beside the holocausts of to-day.

Armand, saved from the swift vengeance of the revolutionaries by
the devotion of the Scarlet Pimpernel, crossed over to England and
enrolled himself tinder the banner of the heroic chief. But he
had been unable hitherto to be an active member of the League.
The chief was loath to allow him to run foolhardy risks. The St.
Justs--both Marguerite and Armand--were still very well-known in
Paris. Marguerite was not a woman easily forgotten, and her
marriage with an English "aristo" did not please those republican
circles who had looked upon her as their queen. Armand's secession
from his party into the ranks of the emigres had singled him out
for special reprisals, if and whenever he could be got hold of,
and both brother and sister had an unusually bitter enemy in their
cousin Antoine St. Just--once an aspirant to Marguerite's hand,
and now a servile adherent and imitator of Robespierre, whose
ferocious cruelty he tried to emulate with a view to ingratiating
himself with the most powerful man of the day.