he effort to speak, to laugh, to
appear unconcerned, was apparently beyond his strength. His cheeks and
lips were livid in hue, the skin clung like a thin layer of wax to the
bones of cheek and jaw, and the heavy lids that fell over the eyes had
purple patches on them like lead.

To a system in such an advanced state of exhaustion the stale water and
dusty bread must have been terribly nauseating, and Chauvelin himself
callous and thirsting for vengeance though he was, could hardly bear to
look calmly on the martyrdom of this man whom he and his colleagues were
torturing in order to gain their own ends.

An ashen hue, which seemed like the shadow of the hand of death, passed
over the prisoner's face. Chauvelin felt compelled to avert his gaze. A
feeling that was almost akin to remorse had stirred a hidden cord in his
heart. The feeling did not last--the heart had been too long atrophied
by the constantly recurring spectacles of cruelties, massacres, and
wholesale hecatombs perpetrated in the past eighteen months in the name
of liberty and fraternity to be capable of a sustained effort in
the direction of gentleness or of pity. Any noble instinct in these
revolutionaries had long ago been drowned in a whirlpool of exploits
that would forever sully the records of humanity; and this keeping of
a fellow-creature on the rack in order to wring from him a Judas-like
betrayal was but a complement to a record of infamy that had ceased by
its very magnitude to weigh upon their souls.

Chauvelin was in no way different from his colleagues; the crimes in
which he had had no hand he had condoned by continuing to serve the
Government that had committed them, and his ferocity in the present case
was increased a thousandfold by his personal hatred for the man who had
so often fooled and baffled him.

When he looked round a second or two later that ephemeral fit of remorse
did its final vanishing; he had once more encountered the pleasant
smile, the laughing if ashen-pale face of his unconquered foe.

"Only a passing giddiness, my dear sir," said Sir Percy lightly. "As you
were saying--"

At the airily-spoken words, at the smile that accompanied them,
Chauvelin had jumped to his feet. There was something almost
supernatural, weird, and impish about the present situation, about this
dying man who, like an impudent schoolboy, seemed to be mocking Death
with his tongue in his cheek, about his laugh that appeared to find its
echo in