strangely pale and earnest.

"Citizen Chauvelin!" gasped Armand, more surprised than frightened at
this unexpected apparition.

"Himself, citizen, at your service," replied Chauvelin with his quiet,
ironical manner. "I am the bearer of a letter for you from Sir Percy
Blakeney. Have I your permission to enter?"

Mechanically Armand stood aside, allowing the other man to pass in. He
closed the door behind his nocturnal visitor, then, taper in hand, he
preceded him into the inner room.

It was the same one in which a fortnight ago a fighting lion had been
brought to his knees. Now it lay wrapped in gloom, the feeble light of
the candle only lighting Armand's face and the white frill of his shirt.
The young man put the taper down on the table and turned to his visitor.

"Shall I light the lamp?" he asked.

"Quite unnecessary," replied Chauvelin curtly. "I have only a letter to
deliver, and after that to ask you one brief question."

From the pocket of his coat he drew the letter which Blakeney had
written an hour ago.

"The prisoner wrote this in my presence," he said as he handed the
letter over to Armand. "Will you read it?"

Armand took it from him, and sat down close to the table; leaning
forward he held the paper near the light, and began to read. He read
the letter through very slowly to the end, then once again from the
beginning. He was trying to do that which Chauvelin had wished to do
an hour ago; he was trying to find the inner meaning which he felt must
inevitably lie behind these words which Percy had written with his own
hand.

That these bare words were but a blind to deceive the enemy Armand never
doubted for a moment. In this he was as loyal as Marguerite would have
been herself. Never for a moment did the suspicion cross his mind that
Blakeney was about to play the part of a coward, but he, Armand, felt
that as a faithful friend and follower he ought by instinct to know
exactly what his chief intended, what he meant him to do.

Swiftly his thoughts flew back to that other letter, the one which
Marguerite had given him--the letter full of pity and of friendship
which had brought him hope and a joy and peace which he had thought at
one time that he would never know again. And suddenly one sentence in
that letter stood out so clearly before his eyes that it blurred the
actual, tangible ones on the paper which even now rustled in his hand.

But if at any time you receive another letter from