fore the party came up. They turned down
and stood up in a doorway till the footsteps had passed, and then
resumed their way.

"It is still too early for us to walk through the streets without
exciting attention," Harry said. "We had better make down to the
river and wait there till the town is quite astir."

In ten minutes they reached the river, and Harry found a seat for
them at the foot of a pile of timber, where they were partially
screened from observation. Hitherto the girls had not spoken a
word since they had issued from the house. Virginie was dazed and
frightened by the events of the night, and had hurried along almost
mechanically holding Marie's hand. Marie's brain was too full to
talk; her thoughts were with her father and mother and with her
absent lover. She wondered that he had not come to her in spite of
everything. Perhaps he was already a captive; perhaps, in obedience
to his father's orders, he was in hiding, waiting events. That
he could, even had his father commanded him, have left Paris as a
fugitive without coming to see her, did not even occur to her as
possible.

With these thoughts there was mingled a vague wonder at her own
position. A few weeks since petted and cared for as the eldest
daughter of one of the noblest families of France, now a fugitive
in the streets under the sole care of this English boy. She had,
the evening before, silently sided with Ernest. It had seemed to
her wrong that he should be sent away, and the assertion of Harry
that he intended to stay and watch over her and her sisters seemed
at once absurd and presumptuous; but she already felt that she had
been wrong in that opinion.

The decision and coolness with which he had at once taken the
command from the moment he met them in the gallery, and the quickness
with which he had seized the only mode of escape, had surprised
and dominated her. Her own impulse, when on opening the door she
heard the attack that was being made on the gate, was to draw back
instantly and return to the side of her parents, and it was due to
Harry only that she and her sisters had got safely away.

Hitherto, although after the incident of the mad dog she had exchanged
her former attitude of absolute indifference to one of cordiality
and friendliness, she had regarded him as a boy. Indeed she had
treated and considered him as being very much younger than Ernest,
and in some respects she had been justified in doing so, for in
his light-h