ing alertly about with a pair of very bright eyes
magnified by heavy glasses. The haughtiest of the carriage-crowd felt
honoured by his bow, for it was none other than that great diplomat,
Theophile Delcasse, Minister of Marine.

M. Delcasse was not in the habit of being abroad so early; it was a full
hour before his usual time; but he had an appointment to keep which he
regarded as most important, so he strode rapidly across the square,
entered the handsome building to the north of it, and mounted to the
first floor, where, on the corner overlooking the square on one side and
the Rue Royale on the other, he had his office.

Early as it was, he found awaiting him the man whom he wished to see--a
thin wisp of a man, with straggling white beard and a shock of white
hair and a face no wider than one's hand, but lighted by the keenest
eyes in the world--in a word, Louis Jean Baptiste Lepine, Prefect of
Police, to whom full justice has not been done in this story--nor in any
other. M. Lepine had not found the hour early; to him, all hours were
the same, for he was a man who slept only when he found the time, which
was often not at all.

"Good morning, my dear Prefect," said Delcasse, drawing off his gloves.
"I trust I have not kept you waiting?"

"I but just arrived," Lepine assured him; "and I know of no better place
to pass one's idle moments than at this window of yours."

Beyond it stretched the great square, with its obelisk and circle of
statues, its pavilions and balustrades; beautiful now, and peaceful, but
peopled with ghastly memories--for it was here the Revolution set up its
guillotine, and it was here that some four thousand men and women, high
and low, looked their last upon this earth, mounted the scaffold and
passed under the knife. Surely, if any spot on earth be haunted, it is
this!

Something of this, perhaps, was in the minds of these two men, as they
stood for a moment looking down into the square, for their faces were
very thoughtful; then Delcasse's eyes travelled from one to another of
the heroic figures representing the great towns of France--Lyons,
Marseilles, Brest, Rouen, Bordeaux, Nantes, Lille--and came to rest upon
the last one, Strasbourg, hung with black and piled with mourning
garlands, in memory of the lost Alsace. Every morning, before he turned
to the day's work, M. Delcasse, standing at this window, gazed at that
statue, while he registered anew the vow that those garlands should o