mask the large sums which on occasion he dispensed in charity, he was wont
to give out that he was the agent of wealthy persons who trusted him in
their alms-giving.

Events brought him into immediate contact with Fleur-de-Marie, and
Rigolette (who lived in his own house in the Rue du Temple).

The former he had rescued from her wretchedness and provided with a home on
a farm at Bouqueval, whence she had been abducted by Chouette and comrades
of hers, by orders of Jacques Ferrand, who wanted her put out of the way.

The wretches who had undertaken to drown the girl with Ferrand's
housekeeper (become dangerous to him, as one aware of too many of his
secrets) murdered the latter, but the former, swept from their sight by the
Seine's current, had been saved by a former prison-mate of hers, a girl of
twenty, so wild in manner as to have won the nickname of Louve (Wolf).

Snatched from death, the exhausted girl now lay, but a little this side of
life's confines, in the house of Dr. Griffon, at Asnieres, under his care
and that of the Count of St. Remy, two gentlemen who had seen her escape.

Rudolph was seeking her all this while, yet not so busily that he forgot
his avenger's course. Chief among social oppressors, whose cunning baffled
the law, and verified the old saying of "what is everybody's business is
nobody's business," Jacques Ferrand stood.

He withheld a large sum of money, intrusted _verbally_ to him, from
its owner, the Baroness Fermont, and impoverished her and her daughter; he
had seduced his servant Louise Morel, caused her imprisonment on a charge
of child-murder, driving her father, a working jeweler, insane, and