Chauvelin he flashed the light upon the prisoner's averted head.

Mole cursed for awhile, and muttered something about "good patriots" and
about "retribution." Then, worried by the light, he turned slowly round,
and with fish-like, bleary eyes looked upon his visitor.

The words of stinging irony and triumphant sarcasm, all fully prepared,
froze on Chauvelin's lips. He gazed upon the prisoner, and a weird sense
of something unfathomable and mysterious came over him as he gazed. He
himself could not have defined that feeling: the very next moment he was
prepared to ridicule his own cowardice--yes, cowardice! because for a
second or two he had felt positively afraid.

Afraid of what, forsooth? The man who crouched here in the cell was his
arch-enemy, the Scarlet Pimpernel--the man whom he hated most bitterly
in all the world, the man whose death he desired more than that of any
other living creature. He had been apprehended by the very side of the
murdered man whose confidence he had all but gained. He himself
(Chauvelin) had at that fateful moment looked into the factitious Mole's
eyes, had seen the mockery in them, the lazy insouciance which was the
chief attribute of Sir Percy Blakeney. He had heard a faint echo of that
inane laugh which grated upon his nerves. Hebert had then laid hands
upon this very same man; agents of the Surete had barred every ingress
and egress to the house, had conducted their prisoner straightway to the
depot and thence to the Abbaye, had since that moment guarded him on
sight, by day and by night. Hebert and the other men as well as the
chief warder, all swore to that!

No, no! There could be no doubt! There was no doubt! The days of magic
were over! A man could not assume a personality other than his own; he