lish; thus he did not hear or heed
certain observations of the bystanders, which made his father's pale
cheek grow paler.

"What is the batch to-day?" quoth a butcher in the wagon. "Scarce worth
the baking,--only two; but one, they say, is an aristocrat,--a ci-devant
marquis," answered a carpenter. "Ah, a marquis! Bon! And the other?"

"Only a dancer, but a pretty one, it is true; I could pity her, but
she is English." And as he pronounced the last word, with a tone of
inexpressible contempt, the butcher spat, as if in nausea.

"Mort diable! a spy of Pitt's, no doubt. What did they discover?"

A man, better dressed than the rest, turned round with a smile, and
answered: "Nothing worse than a lover, I believe; but that lover was a
proscrit. The ci-devant marquis was caught disguised in her apartment.
She betrayed for him a good, easy friend of the people who had long
loved her, and revenge is sweet."

The man whom we have accompanied, nervously twitched up the collar of
his cloak, and his compressed lips told that he felt the anguish of the
laugh that circled round him.

"They are coming! There they are!" cried the boy, in ecstatic
excitement.

"That's the way to bring up citizens," said the butcher, patting the
child's shoulder, and opening a still better view for him at the edge of
the wagon.

The crowd now abruptly gave way. The tumbril was in sight. A man, young
and handsome, standing erect and with folded arms in the fatal vehicle,
looked along the mob with an eye of careless scorn. Though he wore the
dress of a workman, the most unpractised glance could detect, in his
mien and bearing, one of the hated noblesse, whose characteristics came
out even more forcibly at the hour of death. On the lip was that
smile of gay and insolent levity, on the brow that gallant if reckless
contempt of physical danger, which had signalized the hero-coxcombs
of the old regime. Even the rude dress was worn with a certain air
of foppery, and the bright hair was carefully adjusted, as if for the
holiday of the headsman. As the eyes of the young noble wandered over
the fierce faces of that horrible assembly, while a roar of hideous
triumph answered the look, in which for the last time the gentilhomme
spoke his scorn of the canaille, the child's father lowered the collar
of his cloak, and slowly raised his hat from his brow. The eye of the
marquis rested upon the countenance thus abruptly shown to him, and
which suddenly became i