arly in
the evening. She found the letter and retired into the next room to read
it.

"Vengeance is assured. Fanfar and Goutran are prisoners in the house of
Monte-Cristo. As to the girl, she is at the house at Courberrie, where
Esperance will arrive too late."

Hardly had Carmen grasped the sense of these words than she ran to her
room, and wrapping herself in her long black cloak, left the hotel by
the private door.

CHAPTER LXIV.

THE PLOT.

We left Esperance in the house at Courberrie just when the panels had
been thrown open. He uttered a cry of horror. What did he see? Around a
table covered with glasses sat a number of women singing drunken songs,
and among these women sat one pale as a ghost, and this one was Jane!

Ah! poor child! Of what terrible machination was she the victim?

Benedetto, who required her as a tool for his vengeance, had carried her
through the subterranean passage, she all the time entirely unconscious.
He laid her on a sofa, and stood with folded arms looking down upon her.
Did he feel the smallest emotion of pity? No, not he! He was only asking
himself if the girl was so attractive that Esperance would really feel
her loss as much as his enemies wished. Suddenly she sighed--a long,
strange, fluttering sigh. Benedetto leaned over her anxiously. What if
she were to die now! He must hasten. Everything had been arranged. He
opened her teeth with the blade of a knife, and poured down her throat a
few drops of a clear white liquor. It was an anesthetic whose terrible
properties he well understood. Jane would see, Jane would hear, and Jane
would suffer, but as she could neither speak nor move--all resistance
would be impossible. And, that night she was carried to the house at
Courberrie, what terrible agony she suffered! She knew that she was in
the power of an enemy, that she had been torn from him whom she loved
better than life, and from whose lips she had just heard oaths of
eternal fidelity. With a heart swelling with agony she could not utter a
sound. Her soul was alive, but her body was motionless. Suddenly the
room in which she lay was brilliantly illuminated. A crowd of women came
pouring in--and such women! My readers who remember Jane's past can
readily imagine that the girl regarded this scene as a hideous dream.
She even fancied that she saw her mother.

Esperance beheld all this. He rushed forward, only to be stopped by iron
bars.

This terrible scene had been mo