cken down, like one of God's lambs attacked by
the ravening wolf. Your eyes were closed and you were blissfully
unconscious. I was taken before the governor of the prison, and he told
me that you would share the cell with me for a time, and that I was to
watch you night and day, because..."

The old man paused again. Evidently what he had to say was very
difficult to put into words. He groped in his pockets and brought out
a large bandana handkerchief, red and yellow and green, with which
he began to mop his moist forehead. The quaver in his voice and the
trembling of his hands became more apparent and pronounced.

"Yes, M. l'Abbe? Because?..." queried Marguerite gently.

"They said that if I guarded you well, Felicite and Francois would
be set free," replied the old man after a while, during which he made
vigorous efforts to overcome his nervousness, "and that if you escaped
the children and I would be guillotined the very next day."

There was silence in the little room now. The Abbe was sitting quite
still, clasping his trembling fingers, and Marguerite neither moved nor
spoke. What the old man had just said was very slowly finding its way to
the innermost cells of her brain. Until her mind had thoroughly grasped
the meaning of it all, she could not trust herself to make a single
comment.

It was some seconds before she fully understood it all, before she
realized what it meant not only to her, but indirectly to her husband.
Until now she had not been fully conscious of the enormous wave of hope
which almost in spite of herself had risen triumphant above the dull,
grey sea of her former despair; only now when it had been shattered
against this deadly rock of almost superhuman devilry and cunning did
she understand what she had hoped, and what she must now completely
forswear.

No bolts and bars, no fortified towers or inaccessible fortresses could
prove so effectual a prison for Marguerite Blakeney as the dictum which
morally bound her to her cell.

"If you escape the children and I would be guillotined the very next
day."

This meant that even if Percy knew, even if he could reach her, he
could never set her free, since her safety meant death to two innocent
children and to this simple hearted man.

It would require more than the ingenuity of the Scarlet Pimpernel
himself to untie this Gordian knot.

"I don't mind for myself, of course," the old man went on with gentle
philosophy. "I have lived my life.