dared not ask herself if he would sacrifice his love.

Twice in a few weeks he had been over to France: every time he went
she could not know if she would ever see him again. She could not
imagine how the French Committee of Public Safety could so
clumsily allow the hated Scarlet Pimpernel to slip through its fingers.
But she never attempted either to warn him or to beg him not to go.
When he brought Paul Deroulede and Juliette Marny over from
France, her heart went out to the two young people in sheer gladness
and pride because of his precious life, which he had risked for them.

She loved Juliette for the dangers Percy had passed, for the anxieties
she herself had endured; only to-day, in the midst of this beautiful
sunshine, this joy of the earth, of summer and of the sky, she had
suddenly felt a mad, overpowering anxiety, a deadly hatred of the
wild adventurous life, which took him so often away from her side.
His pleasant, bantering reply precluded her following up the subject,
whilst the merry chatter of people round her warned her to keep her
words and looks under control.

But she seemed now to feel the want of being alone, and, somehow,
that distant booth with its flaring placard, and the crier in the
Phrygian cap, exercised a weird fascination over her.

Instinctively she bent her steps thither, and equally instinctively the
idle throng of her friends followed her. Sir Percy alone had halted in
order to converse with Lord Hastings, who had just arrived.

"Surely, Lady Blakeney, you have no though of patronising that
gruesome spectacle?" said Lord Anthony Dewhurst, as Marguerite