uit each other,"
replied Carlos.

"Go back to Valenciennes! What are you thinking of, monsieur?" cried
Europe in alarm.

Europe, who was born at Valenciennes, the child of very poor parents,
had been sent at seven years of age to a spinning factory, where the
demands of modern industry had impaired her physical strength, just as
vice had untimely depraved her. Corrupted at the age of twelve, and
a mother at thirteen, she found herself bound to the most degraded of
human creatures. On the occasion of a murder case, she had been as a
witness before the Court. Haunted at sixteen by a remnant of rectitude,
and the terror inspired by the law, her evidence led to the prisoner
being sentenced to twenty years of hard labor.

The convict, one of those men who have been in the hands of justice more
than once, and whose temper is apt at terrible revenge, had said to the
girl in open court:

"In ten years, as sure as you live, Prudence" (Europe's name was
Prudence Servien), "I will return to be the death of you, if I am
scragged for it."

The President of the Court tried to reassure the girl by promising
her the protection and the care of the law; but the poor child was so
terror-stricken that she fell ill, and was in hospital nearly a year.
Justice is an abstract being, represented by a collection of individuals
who are incessantly changing, whose good intentions and memories are,
like themselves, liable to many vicissitudes. Courts and tribunals can
do nothing to hinder crimes; their business is to deal with them when
done. From this point of view, a preventive police would be a boon to
a country; but the mere word Police is in these days a bugbear
to legislators, who no longer can distinguish between the three
words--Government, Administration, and Law-making. The legislator tends
to centralize everything in the State, as if the State could act.

The convict would be sure always to remember his victim, and to avenge
himself when Justice had ceased to think of either of them.

Prudence, who instinctively appreciated the danger--in a general sense,
so to speak--left Valenciennes and came to Paris at the age of seventeen
to hide there. She tried four trades, of which the most successful was
that of a "super" at a minor theatre. She was picked up by Paccard,
and to him she told her woes. Paccard, Jacques Collin's disciple and
right-hand man, spoke of this girl to his master, and when the master
needed a slave he said to Pru