ed against the framework of it,
looking still anxiously all round him.

Marguerite contrived for the moment to evade her present attentive
cavalier, and she skirted the fashionable crowd, drawing nearer to the
doorway, against which Sir Andrew was leaning. Why she wished to get
closer to him, she could not have said: perhaps she was impelled by an
all-powerful fatality, which so often seems to rule the destinies of
men.

Suddenly she stopped: her very heart seemed to stand still, her eyes,
large and excited, flashed for a moment towards that doorway, then as
quickly were turned away again. Sir Andrew Ffoulkes was still in the
same listless position by the door, but Marguerite had distinctly seen
that Lord Hastings--a young buck, a friend of her husband's and one of
the Prince's set--had, as he quickly brushed past him, slipped something
into his hand.

For one moment longer--oh! it was the merest flash--Marguerite paused:
the next she had, with admirably played unconcern, resumed her walk
across the room--but this time more quickly towards that doorway whence
Sir Andrew had now disappeared.

All this, from the moment that Marguerite had caught sight of Sir Andrew
leaning against the doorway, until she followed him into the little
boudoir beyond, had occurred in less than a minute. Fate is usually
swift when she deals a blow.

Now Lady Blakeney had suddenly ceased to exist. It was Marguerite
St. Just who was there only: Marguerite St. Just who had passed her
childhood, her early youth, in the protecting arms of her brother
Armand. She had forgotten everything else--her rank, her dignity, her
secret enthusiasms--everything save that Armand stood in peril of
his life, and that there, not twenty feet away from her, in the small
boudoir which was quite deserted, in the very hands of Sir Andrew
Ffoulkes, might be the talisman which would save her brother's life.

Barely another thirty seconds had elapsed between the moment when Lord
Hastings slipped the mysterious "something" into Sir Andrew's hand, and
the one when she, in her turn, reached the deserted boudoir. Sir Andrew
was standing with his back to her and close to a table upon which stood
a massive silver candelabra. A slip of paper was in his hand, and he was
in the very act of perusing its contents.

Unperceived, her soft clinging robe making not the slightest sound upon
the heavy carpet, not daring to breathe until she had accomplished her
purpose, Marguerit