nd edgewise, let it drop
significantly over the hunchback's head. That action and the hints which
preceded it seemed to bewilder the little man more than ever. He stared
perplexedly at Lomaque; uttered a word or two of rough apology to his
subordinate, and rolling his misshapen head portentously, walked away
with the death-list crumpled up nervously in his hand.

"I should like to have a sight of them, and see if they really are
the same man and woman whom I looked after yesterday morning in the
waiting-room," said Lomaque, putting his hand on the cell door, just as
the deputy-jailer was about to close it again.

"Look in, by all means," said the man. "No doubt you will find that
drunken booby as wrong in what he told you about them as he is about
everything else."

Lomaque made use of the privilege granted to him immediately. He saw
Trudaine sitting with his sister in the corner of the cell furthest from
the door, evidently for the purpose of preventing her from overhearing
the conversation outside. There was an unsettled look, however, in her
eyes, a slowly-heightening color in her cheeks, which showed her to be
at least vaguely aware that something unusual had been taking place in
the corridor.

Lomaque beckoned to Trudaine to leave her, and whispered to him: "The
prescription has worked well. You are safe for to-day. Break the news
to your sister as gently as you can. Danville--" He stopped and
listened till he satisfied himself, by the sound of the deputy-jailer's
footsteps, that the man was lounging toward the further end of the
corridor. "Danville," he resumed, "after having mixed with the people
outside the grate yesterday, and having heard your names read, was
arrested in the evening by secret order from Robespierre, and sent to
the Temple. What charge will be laid to him, or when he will be brought
to trial, it is impossible to say. I only know that he is arrested.
Hush! don't talk now; my friend outside is coming back. Keep quiet--hope
everything from the chances and changes of public affairs; and comfort
yourself with the thought that you are both safe for to-day."

"And to-morrow?" whispered Trudaine.

"Don't think of to-morrow," returned Lomaque, turning away hurriedly to
the door "Let to-morrow take care of itself."

PART THIRD.

CHAPTER 1.

On a spring morning, in the year seventeen hundred and ninety-eight, the
public conveyance then running between Chalons-sur-Marne and Paris sat