or to beg him not to go. When he brought
Paul Deroulede and Juliette Marny over from France, her heart went
out to the two young people in sheer gladness and pride because of his
precious life, which he had risked for them.

She loved Juliette for the dangers Percy had passed, for the anxieties
she herself had endured; only to-day, in the midst of this beautiful
sunshine, this joy of the earth, of summer and of the sky, she had
suddenly felt a mad, overpowering anxiety, a deadly hatred of the
wild adventurous life, which took him so often away from her side. His
pleasant, bantering reply precluded her following up the subject, whilst
the merry chatter of people round her warned her to keep her words and
looks under control.

But she seemed now to feel the want of being alone, and, somehow, that
distant booth with its flaring placard, and the crier in the Phrygian
cap, exercised a weird fascination over her.

Instinctively she bent her steps thither, and equally instinctively the
idle throng of her friends followed her. Sir Percy alone had halted in
order to converse with Lord Hastings, who had just arrived.

"Surely, Lady Blakeney, you have no though of patronising that
gruesome spectacle?" said Lord Anthony Dewhurst, as Marguerite almost
mechanically had paused within a few yards of the solitary booth.

"I don't know," she said, with enforced gaiety, "the place seems
to attract me. And I need not look at the spectacle," she added
significantly, as she pointed to a roughly-scribbled notice at the
entrance of the tent: "In aid of the starving poor of Paris."

"There's a good-looking woman who sings, and a hideous mechanical toy
that moves," said one of the young men in the crowd. "It is very dark
and close inside the tent. I was lured in there for my sins, and was in
a mighty hurry to come out again."

"Then it must be my sins that are helping to lure me too at the present
moment," said Marguerite lightly. "I pray you all to let me go in there.
I want to hear the good-looking woman sing, even if I do not see the
hideous toy on the move."

"May I escort you then, Lady Blakeney?" said Lord Tony.

"Nay! I would rather go in alone," she replied a trifle impatiently. "I
beg of you not to heed my whim, and to await my return, there, where the
music is at its merriest."

It had been bad manners to insist. Marguerite, with a little
comprehensive nod to all her friends, left the young cavaliers still
protesting and qu