her that that was no dream-voice, no trick of her
overburdened mind. A voice, a living, actual voice had uttered those
words in this room, here at her elbow.

She turned, and again she almost screamed; for there, just behind her,
his glittering eyes fixed upon her with singular intentness, stood the
swarthy, black-haired Italian gaoler they had given her because he had
no French.

He had come up so quietly behind her that she had not heard his
approach, and he was leaning forward now, with an odd suggestion of
crouching in his attitude, like a beast about to spring. Yet his gaze
riveted hers as with a fascination. And so, while she looked, his lips
moved, and from them, in that same voice of her dreams, came from this
man who had no French, the words:

"Be not afraid, mademoiselle. I am that blunderer, Garnache, that
unworthy fool whose temper ruined what chance of saving you he had a
week ago."

She stared like one going mad.

"Garnache!" said she, in a husky whisper. "You Garnache?"

Yet the voice, she knew, was Garnache's and none other. It was a voice
not easily mistaken. And now, as she looked and looked, she saw that the
man's nose was Garnache's, though oddly stained, and those keen eyes,
they were Garnache's too. But the hair that had been brown and flecked
with grey was black; the reddish mustachios that had bristled like a
mountain cat's were black, too, and they hung limp and hid from sight
the fine lines of his mouth. A hideous stubble of unshorn beard defaced
his chin and face, and altered its sharp outline; and the clear, healthy
skin that she remembered was now a dirty brown.

Suddenly the face smiled, and it was a smile that reassured her and
drove away the last doubt that she had. She was on her feet in an
instant.

"Monsieur, monsieur," was all that she could say; but her longing was to
fling her arms about the neck of this man, as she might have flung them
about the neck of a brother or a father, and sob out upon his shoulder
the sudden relief and revulsion that his presence brought.

Garnache saw something of her agitation, and to relieve it he smiled and
began to tell her the circumstances of his return and his presentation
to Madame as a knave who had no French.

"Fortune was very good to me, mademoiselle," said he. "I had little hope
that such a face as mine could be disguised, but I take no pride in what
you see. It is the handiwork of Rabecque, the most ingenious lackey that
ever s