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The Elusive Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
page 72 of 335 (21%)
Chaubertin?"

"Chauvelin, Sir Percy," remarked the ex-ambassador drily.

He was determined not to lose his temper and looked urbane and
pleasant, whilst his impudent enemy was enjoying a joke at his expense.
Marguerite the while had not taken her eyes off the keen, shrewd face.
Whilst the three men talked, she seemed suddenly to have lost her sense
of the reality of things. The present situation appeared to her strangely
familiar, like a dream which she had dreamt oft times before.

Suddenly it became absolutely clear to her that the whole scene had been
arranged and planned: the booth with its flaring placard, Demoiselle
Candeille soliciting her patronage, her invitation to the young actress,
Chauvelin's sudden appearance, all, all had been concocted and arranged,
not here, not in England at all, but out there in Paris, in some dark
gathering of blood-thirsty ruffians, who had invented a final trap for the
destruction of the bold adventurer, who went by the name of the Scarlet
Pimpernel.

And she also was only a puppet, enacting a part which had been written
for her: she had acted just as THEY had anticipated, had spoken the very
words they had meant her to say: and when she looked at Percy, he
seemed supremely ignorant of it all, unconscious of this trap of the
existence of which everyone here present was aware, save indeed himself.
She would have fought against this weird feeling of obsession, of being a
mechanical toy would up to do certain things, but this she could not do;
her will appeared paralysed, her tongue even refused her service.

As in a dream she heard His Royal Highness ask for the name of the
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