lingly clear to her. Chauvelin wished that the
fugitives should be left in false security waiting in their hidden
retreat until Percy joined them. Then the daring plotter was to be
surrounded and caught red-handed, in the very act of aiding and abetting
royalists, who were traitors to the republic. Thus, if his capture were
noised abroad, even the British Government could not legally protest in
his favour; having plotted with the enemies of the French Government,
France had the right to put him to death.

Escape for him and them would be impossible. All the roads patrolled
and watched, the trap well set, the net, wide at present, but drawing
together tighter and tighter, until it closed upon the daring plotter,
whose superhuman cunning even could not rescue him from its meshes now.

Desgas was about to go, but Chauvelin once more called him back.
Marguerite vaguely wondered what further devilish plans he could have
formed, in order to entrap one brave man, alone, against two-score of
others. She looked at him as he turned to speak to Desgas; she could
just see his face beneath the broad-brimmed, CURES'S hat. There was at
that moment so much deadly hatred, such fiendish malice in the thin face
and pale, small eyes, that Marguerite's last hope died in her heart, for
she felt that from this man she could expect no mercy.

"I had forgotten," repeated Chauvelin, with a weird chuckle, as he
rubbed his bony, talon-like hands one against the other, with a gesture
of fiendish satisfaction. "The tall stranger may show fight. In any
case no shooting, remember, except as a last resort. I want that tall
stranger alive . . . if possible."

He laughed, as Dante has told us that the devils laugh at the sight of
the torture of the damned. Marguerite had thought that by now she had
lived through the whole gamut of horror and anguish that human heart
could bear; yet now, when Desgas left the house, and she remained alone
in this lonely, squalid room, with that fiend for company, she felt
as if all that she had suffered was nothing compared with this. He
continued to laugh and chuckle to himself for awhile, rubbing his hands
together in anticipation of his triumph.

His plans were well laid, and he might well triumph! Not a loophole
was left, through which the bravest, the most cunning man might escape.
Every road guarded, every corner watched, and in that lonely hut
somewhere on the coast, a small band of fugitives waiting for their