h a quarrel. With a cry of delight, that burst from
his very soul, he sprang to the side of the carriage and grasped the
door. Before he reached it, however, some one from within had drawn her
away and shut the window close, and the horses being again in motion,
and rapidly quickening their pace to a gallop, Gabriel ran by the side,
tugging vainly at the door, until one of the mounted attendants,
spurring beside, seized him by the collar, and flung him headlong upon
the road.

Stunned and giddy, he got upon his feet again, and staggered blindly
after the whirling carriage, uttering threats and defiances as huge as
ever were thundered from the lips of the renowned knight of La Mancha.
All would not do, however; the cortege held on its way with whirlwind
speed. Vainly Gabriel strained every sinew to overtake the coach. The
fell enchanters rapt his peerless mistress from his eyes, and every
moment the distance between him and them became wider and more hopeless.
At last, breathless, exhausted, enraged, he was forced to give over the
pursuit, after having maintained it for nearly three miles over the
pavements of the long straight road.

It was on the highway to Paris; thither he assumed they were bound, and
there he resolved that night should behold him also. Sometimes running,
sometimes walking with hurried strides, he steadily and rapidly pursued
his way; his imagination every moment filled with images of the strange
golden dragons and cupids, and the pale, beautiful face of Lucille
shrieking from among them for help.

"What then had befallen Lucille?" The reader shall hear.

The first symptom which assured her that Blassemare was at work in the
realization of this plot, was that her Norman woman, having stayed away
longer than usual at her suppertime, returned with a very flushed face
and dancing eyes, and altogether in a very hilarious and impertinent
mood. For a long time, however, it appeared that the woman was only
"pleasantly intoxicated," a state in which she would probably prove a
more effectual check upon her plans of escape than in her ordinary
condition. Spite of the seriousness of the issue, there was something
inconceivably absurd in this distress. The woman was noisy, familiar,
and sometimes indulged in a vein of menacing jocularity, the principal
material of which was supplied from scraps of old Norman ditties. There
was one in particular which had a specially grisly sound in the ears of
the friendless