le to soar beyond
the tying of a cravat or the new cut of a coat. Bah! And yet! . . . vague
memories, that were sweet and ardent and attuned to this calm summer's
evening, came wafted back to her memory, on the invisible wings of the
light sea-breeze: the tie when first he worshipped her; he seemed so
devoted--a very slave--and there was a certain latent intensity in that
love which had fascinated her.

Then suddenly that love, that devotion, which throughout his courtship
she had looked upon as the slavish fidelity of a dog, seemed to vanish
completely. Twenty-four hours after the simple little ceremony at old
St. Roch, she had told him the story of how, inadvertently, she had
spoken of certain matters connected with the Marquis de St. Cyr before
some men--her friends--who had used this information against the
unfortunate Marquis, and sent him and his family to the guillotine.

She hated the Marquis. Years ago, Armand, her dear brother, loved Angele
de St. Cyr, but St. Just was a plebeian, and the Marquis full of
the pride and arrogant prejudices of his caste. One day Armand, the
respectful, timid lover, ventured on sending a small poem--enthusiastic,
ardent, passionate--to the idol of his dreams. The next night he was
waylaid just outside Paris by the valets of Marquis de St. Cyr, and
ignominiously thrashed--thrashed like a dog within an inch of his
life--because he had dared to raise his eyes to the daughter of the
aristocrat. The incident was one which, in those days, some two years
before the great Revolution, was of almost daily occurrence in France;
incidents of that type, in fact, led to bloody reprisals, which a few
years later sent most of those haughty heads to the guillotine.

Marguerite remembered it all: what her brother must have suffered in
his manhood and his pride must have been appalling; what she suffered
through him and with him she never attempted even to analyse.

Then the day of retribution came. St. Cyr and his kin had found their
masters, in those same plebeians whom they had despised. Armand and
Marguerite, both intellectual, thinking beings, adopted with the
enthusiasm of their years the Utopian doctrines of the Revolution,
while the Marquis de St. Cyr and his family fought inch by inch for the
retention of those privileges which had placed them socially above their
fellow-men. Marguerite, impulsive, thoughtless, not calculating the
purport of her words, still smarting under the terrible i