e slipped close behind him. . . . At that moment he
looked round and saw her; she uttered a groan, passed her hand across
her forehead, and murmured faintly:

"The heat in the room was terrible . . . I felt so faint . . . Ah! . . ."

She tottered almost as if she would fall, and Sir Andrew, quickly
recovering himself, and crumpling in his hand the tiny note he had been
reading, was only apparently, just in time to support her.

"You are ill, Lady Blakeney?" he asked with much concern, "Let me . . ."

"No, no, nothing--" she interrupted quickly. "A chair--quick."

She sank into a chair close to the table, and throwing back her head,
closing her eyes.

"There!" she murmured, still faintly; "the giddiness is passing off.
. . . Do not heed me, Sir Andrew; I assure you I already feel better."

At moments like these there is no doubt--and psychologists actually
assert it--that there is in us a sense which has absolutely nothing to
do with the other five: it is not that we see, it is not that we hear
or touch, yet we seem to do all three at once. Marguerite sat there with
her eyes apparently closed. Sir Andrew was immediately behind her,
and on her right was the table with the five-armed candelabra upon it.
Before her mental vision there was absolutely nothing but Armand's face.
Armand, whose life was in the most imminent danger, and who seemed to
be looking at her from a background upon which were dimly painted
the seething crowd of Paris, the bare walls of the Tribunal of Public
Safety, with Foucquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, demanding
Armand's life in the name of the people of France, and the lurid
guillotine with its stained knife waiting for another victim . . .
Armand! . . .

For one moment there was dead silence in the little boudoir. Beyond,
from the brilliant ball-room, the sweet notes of the gavotte, the
frou-frou of rich dresses, the talk and laughter of a large and merry
crowd, came as a strange, weird accompaniment to the drama which was
being enacted here. Sir Andrew had not uttered another word. Then it was
that that extra sense became potent in Marguerite Blakeney. She could
not see, for her two eyes were closed, she could not hear, for the noise
from the ball-room drowned the soft rustle of that momentous scrap of
paper; nevertheless she knew-as if she had both seen and heard--that
Sir Andrew was even now holding the paper to the flame of one of the
candles.

At the exact moment that it began