t in execution when Sainte-Croix was
driving in the carriage of the marquise, whom our readers will doubtless
have recognised as the woman who concealed herself so carefully.

From one's knowledge of the character of Sainte-Croix, it is easy to
imagine that he had to use great self-control to govern the anger he
felt at being arrested in the middle of the street; thus, although
during the whole drive he uttered not a single word, it was plain to see
that a terrible storm was gathering, soon to break. But he preserved the
same impossibility both at the opening and shutting of the fatal gates,
which, like the gates of hell, had so often bidden those who entered
abandon all hope on their threshold, and again when he replied to the
formal questions put to him by the governor. His voice was calm, and
when they gave him they prison register he signed it with a steady hand.
At once a gaoler, taking his orders from the governor, bade him follow:
after traversing various corridors, cold and damp, where the daylight
might sometimes enter but fresh air never, he opened a door, and
Sainte-Croix had no sooner entered than he heard it locked behind him.

At the grating of the lock he turned. The gaoler had left him with no
light but the rays of the moon, which, shining through a barred window
some eight or ten feet from the ground, shed a gleam upon a miserable
truckle-bed and left the rest of the room in deep obscurity. The
prisoner stood still for a moment and listened; then, when he had heard
the steps die away in the distance and knew himself to be alone at last,
he fell upon the bed with a cry more like the roaring of a wild beast
than any human sound: he cursed his fellow-man who had snatched him from
his joyous life to plunge him into a dungeon; he cursed his God who had
let this happen; he cried aloud to whatever powers might be that could
grant him revenge and liberty.

Just at that moment, as though summoned by these words from the bowels
of the earth, a man slowly stepped into the circle of blue light that
fell from the window-a man thin and pale, a man with long hair, in a
black doublet, who approached the foot of the bed where Sainte-Croix
lay. Brave as he was, this apparition so fully answered to his prayers
(and at the period the power of incantation and magic was still believed
in) that he felt no doubt that the arch-enemy of the human race, who
is continually at hand, had heard him and had now come in answer to his