will kindly restrict your
intercourse with her to the most formal limits. Unfortunately," he
continued, with a strange bitterness in his tone, "she is like her
sister, and the same arts that won the one, may win the other from the
path of duty."

"For shame, sir!" the young noble answered, his eyes sparkling with
indignation. "You insult, not me, but your dead daughter! Do you think
that I loved her for her fortune alone? Or that her very image,
untenanted by her soul, would satisfy me?"

"They were singularly alike," Mirande muttered with a grim shrug. "God
knows! At any rate you are warned."

The young man shot at him an angry glance, but said no more; and
Mirande, seeming to be satisfied that his condition was accepted,
dropped the subject and proceeded to show his guest where he might
sleep; for the latter felt a natural reluctance to return to his narrow
prison behind the wainscot. In a few minutes the light was extinguished
and the two men, thus strangely brought together again, lay a few feet
from one another; the mind of each turning in the stillness of the
night, to the link which had bound them, nay, which still bound them in
a forced and uncongenial union.

The Vicomte was aware that his host ran a certain risk in sheltering
him. The supremacy which Robespierre had won at this time, and the
desperate lengths to which he had gone, exposed all who were not of his
immediate following to a jealousy that had already hurried to the
guillotine the chiefs of half a dozen sections of the Republican party.
Mirande, as one of the few surviving Girondins and as a man still
possessing friends and influence was peculiarly obnoxious to suspicion.
The slightest accusation, the word of a servant, the hint of a rival,
would suffice to despatch him also along the path which so many trod
daily.

The Vicomte, therefore, on rising in the morning, proposed to withdraw
to his hiding-place. M. Mirande, however, a little to his guest's
surprise, would not hear of this; observing curtly that he could trust
his household, and that a change of name was all that safety required.
The younger man, whose anxiety was not on his own account only, would
have argued the point; but his host cut short the matter by opening the
door, and ushering the Vicomte, almost before the young man was aware,
into another room--a room, large and scantily furnished, but in other
respects in striking contrast to that which he had left. Here the tall,
nar