nd when only the dexterous turn and tug
would have removed the trophy, a sudden apparition had terrified the
superstitious savages. It was a woman of thirty, whose brown tresses
formed a rich frame around a royal face, toned down by endless sorrowing.
The red-skins shrank from her steady advance, and when her hand was
stretched out between them and their young victim, they uttered a howl of
alarm, and fled as if a host of their foemen were on their track. Gabriel
was saved, but all his life he was doomed to bear that halo of martyrdom,
the circling sweep of the scalper's knife.

He was a Jesuit. By the orders of his society he embarked for Europe. We
should say here, that he, though owning a medal of the seven described,
was unaware that he should have worn it. His vessel was driven by storms
to refit at the Azores, where he had changed ship into the same as was
bearing Prince Djalma to France, via Portsmouth.

But the gales followed him, and sated their fury by wrecking the "Black
Eagle" on the Picardy coast. This was at the same point as were a
disabled Hamburg steamer, among whose passengers where Dagobert and his
two charges, was destroyed the same night. Happily the tempest did not
annihilate them all. There were saved, Prince Djalma and a countryman of
his, one Faringhea, a Thuggee chief, hunted out of British India;
Dagobert, and Rose and Blanche Simon, whom Gabriel had rescued. These
survivors had recovered, thanks to the care they had received in
Cardoville House, a country mansion which had sheltered them, and except
the prince and the Strangler chief, the others were speedily able to go
on to Paris.

The old grenadier and the orphans--until General Simon should be heard
from--dwelt in the former's house. His son had kept it, from his mother's
love for the life-long home. It was such a mean habitation as a workman
like Agricola Baudoin could afford to pay the rent of, and far from the
fit abode of the daughters of the Duke de Ligny and Marshal of France,
which Napoleon had created General Simon, though the rank had only
recently been approved by the restoration.

But in Paris the unknown hostile hand showed itself more malignant than
ever.

The young lady of high name and large fortune was Adrienne de Cardoville,
whose aunt, the Princess de Saint-Dizier, was a Jesuit. Through her and
her accomplices' machinations, the young lady's forward yet virtuous,
wildly aspiring but sensible, romantic but just, char