e way Ranulph knew of
Guida. What Carterette was doing Ranulph was not concerned to know, and
so knew little; and Guida knew and thought little of how Ranulph fared:
which was part of the selfishness of love.

But one day Carterette received a letter from France which excited her
greatly, and sent her off hot-foot to Guida. In the same hour Ranulph
heard a piece of hateful gossip which made him fell to the ground the
man who told him, and sent him with white face, and sick, yet indignant
heart, to the cottage in the Place du Vier Prison.

CHAPTER XXV

Guida was sitting on the veille reading an old London paper she had
bought of the mate of the packet from Southampton. One page contained
an account of the execution of Louis XVI; another reported the fight
between the English thirty-six gun frigate Araminta and the French
Niobe. The engagement had been desperate, the valiant Araminta having
been fought, not alone against odds as to her enemy, but against the
irresistible perils of a coast upon which the Admiralty charts gave
cruelly imperfect information. To the Admiralty we owed the fact, the
journal urged, that the Araminta was now at the bottom of the sea,
and its young commander confined in a French fortress, his brave and
distinguished services lost to the country. Nor had the government yet
sought to lessen the injury by arranging a cartel for the release of the
unfortunate commander.

The Araminta! To Guida the letters of the word seemed to stand out from
the paper like shining hieroglyphs on a misty grey curtain. The rest of
the page was resolved into a filmy floating substance, no more tangible
than the ashy skeleton on which writing still lives when the paper
itself has been eaten by flame, and the flame swallowed by the air.

Araminta--this was all her eyes saw, that familiar name in the flaring
handwriting of the Genius of Life, who had scrawled her destiny in that
one word.

Slowly the monstrous ciphers faded from the grey hemisphere of space,
and she saw again the newspaper in her trembling fingers, the kitchen
into which the sunlight streamed from the open window, the dog Biribi
basking in the doorway. That living quiet which descends upon a house
when the midday meal and work are done came suddenly home to her, in
contrast to the turmoil in her mind and being.

So that was why Philip had not written to her! While her heart was daily
growing more bitter against him, he had been fighting his ve