drawn a red and ominous line across her neck.

And at the table two men were sitting in close and eager conclave.

Between them a solitary tallow candle, unsnuffed and weirdly
flickering, threw fantastic shadows upon the walls, and illumined with
fitful and uncertain light the faces of the two men.

How different were these in character!

One, high cheek-boned, with coarse, sensuous lips, and hair
elaborately and carefully powdered; the other pale and thin-lipped,
with the keen eyes of a ferret and a high intellectual forehead, from
which the sleek brown hair was smoothly brushed away.

The first of these men was Robespierre, the ruthless and incorruptible
demagogue; the other was Citizen Chauvelin, ex-ambassador of the
Revolutionary Government at the English Court.

The hour was late, and the noises from the great, seething city
preparing for sleep came to this remote little apartment in the now
deserted Palace of the Tuileries, merely as a faint and distant echo.

It was two days after the Fructidor Riots. Paul Deroulede and the
woman Juliette Marny, both condemned to death, had been literally
spirited away out of the cart which was conveying them from the Hall
of Justice to the Luxembourg Prison, and news had just been received
by the Committee of Public Safety that at Lyons, the Abbe du Mesnil,
with the ci-devant Chevalier d'Egremont and the latter's wife and
family, had effected a miraculous and wholly incomprehensible escape