Sir Percy Blakeney, as the chronicles of the time inform us, was in this
year of grace 1792, still a year or two on the right side of thirty.
Tall, above the average, even for an Englishman, broad-shouldered and
massively built, he would have been called unusually good-looking,
but for a certain lazy expression in his deep-set blue eyes, and that
perpetual inane laugh which seemed to disfigure his strong, clearly-cut
mouth.

It was nearly a year ago now that Sir Percy Blakeney, Bart., one of the
richest men in England, leader of all the fashions, and intimate friend
of the Prince of Wales, had astonished fashionable society in London
and Bath by bringing home, from one of his journeys abroad, a beautiful,
fascinating, clever, French wife. He, the sleepiest, dullest, most
British Britisher that had ever set a pretty woman yawning, had secured
a brilliant matrimonial prize for which, as all chroniclers aver, there
had been many competitors.

Marguerite St. Just had first made her DEBUT in artistic Parisian
circles, at the very moment when the greatest social upheaval the
world has ever known was taking place within its very walls. Scarcely
eighteen, lavishly gifted with beauty and talent, chaperoned only by
a young and devoted brother, she had soon gathered round her, in
her charming apartment in the Rue Richelieu, a coterie which was as
brilliant as it was exclusive--exclusive, that is to say, only from one
point of view. Marguerite St. Just was from principle and by conviction
a republican--equality of birth was her motto--inequality of fortune
was in her eyes a mere untoward accident, but the only inequality she