CHAP. V. (continued.)

At this moment we heard the voice of M. Biot at the outer door. Stephanie turned pale, and trembled, and, had I not felt that I was now her protector, and gathered strength from the thought, I too might have feared to meet him.

"Take courage, Stephanie," I whispered. "For my sake, now, as well as your father's, play your part as best you can. You are no longer deceiving, but merely outwitting deception. Remember, you are Adrienne now! Go up and kiss him when he enters."

"But oh, Mr. Morley, I have been cruelly forgetful all this time-are you really in danger?"

"Not immediate danger. But hush! Here he comes!" "And indeed," said I, in continuance of an imaginary previous conversation, and pointing to a picture of the arrest of Charlotte Corday, "if this is like her, I think I could have performed her terrible mission, and have faced her retribution, for one bright look of that spiritual face!"

I knew that M. Biot had opened the door, and was hearing me; and I hazarded the first remark that the first picture I turned to suggested in order to give him the idea of a general conversation. As I finished the sentence, Stephanie quietly rose and obeyed my suggestion, and the next moment I was quivering with undefinable terror, when I turned round and met the full gaze of that calm, scrutinizing eye, that always seemed to penetrate, or rather to anticipate my inmost thoughts.

M. Biot saluted me with his own peculiar combination of cordiality and quiet dignity, expressed in a few polite words his regret at not

having been able to see me the previous evening on account of a matter of important business, which he had just that moment finished, and hoped that Adrienne had in some measure repaid the kindness of my visit.

"I think," said I, "that my intrusion here for three nights in succession is sufficient witness of the pleasure I find in availing myself of

your kind invitations. I have to thank Mdlle. Biot for two of the most pleasant evenings of my life."

fused reply, and then, on pretext of a headache, Stephanie slightly bowed, made some conand after a frigid conventional salutation that I felt it hard to imitate, retired for the evening.

And I sat face to face with that immoveable scrutiny! We sat in perfect silence for several minutes after she left, till I felt myself quailing, as I had done at the Table d'hôte at Boulogne, under the influence of his mysterious eye. My feverish desire to spring up and begone was silence in his usual laconic style. becoming intolerable, when he at length broke

"I admit few to her society, Mr. Morley."" privilege of it." "Then must I thank you all the more for the

Another pause.

"What was that you said about Charlotte

Corday?"

66

I somehow felt compelled to answer this man. "but I said that I could have taken her place Perhaps it was spoken lightly," I replied, both in her mission and her fate for even less than her love."

Still another feverish pause.

66

lotte Corday." 'My daughter is more beautiful than Char

"Oh, a thousand times!"

And this time I met his eye unquelled, for I was speaking from the heart.

"And she, too, has a mission to fulfil."

"A mission! I trust it is not one that involves danger?"

"There will be much danger, but not to herself."

"Excuse me, I am but a new acquaintance,

but, since you tell me so much, may I ask what is the nature of it?"

"To reward with her love and beauty him who shall risk his life for her and for the

world!"

I felt that a crisis was at hand, yet I gathered courage from his conversation, as it showed plainly that, with all his mysterious means of

K

knowledge, he was evidently ignorant of what had passed between Stephanie and myself.

"There are many who would do this," I replied, "who would be utterly unworthy of her. And there are many who might be worthy of her who might yet love her too much to ask her to share a life of poverty."

"The mission" (and he always pronounced the word with a slight sneer), "the mission provides for that case also. I am not wealthy, but I can give my daughter two hundred and fifty thousand francs. She has a villa of her own, too, though she has never seen it, and which she shall not see till some one such as I have long sought to meet shall lead her into it as her bridal home. It stands on the coast of Sicily, high up among sunny hills, looking from a grove of cypress and walnut-trees, down through long rows of aloes, down over clustering vineyards to the most gladsome of seas! To the scholar there are the exhaustless traces of the grandeur of Magna Grecia; to the lover of nature there is everything, from the strange, beautiful shells on the beach to the snowy summit of Etna, purpling in gorgeous sunset; to the lover of woman there will be Adrienne! Have you any taste for such a life, Mr. Morley?"

"I cannot misunderstand you, sir," said I, gathering all my courage. "There is something you wish me to do; why not name it to me at

once ?"

"I do not think you are yet prepared to hear it !"

"What preparation do I need?" "You have to learn to appreciate the reward I have named to you."

"But what if I have been bold enough to acknowledge to my own heart that I already love your daughter; that I feel myself willing to risk everything except honour for the sake of her love and hand? what if I have already been bold enough to tell her so, and fortunate enough to find myself favoured beyond expectation ?" "But is it so ?"

"It is so, indeed!"

And I fancied I could detect a slight relaxing of the muscles of that marble face, indicative, not exactly of pleasure, but of something like complacency.

"It was bold, indeed," said he; "but I am not displeased. I saw all this when I read your face at Boulogne: I saw that you were capable of great and daring deeds, that you were worthy of being received into a noble brotherhood, whose bond of union is the hatred of oppression-nay, that from your energy of character you were peculiarly fitted to become the very hand of that body of which I am proud to be the head! Do you feel prepared to know more?"

Of course I did; and feeling that I had overreached even the mysterious Biot, I was madly impelled by curiosity to penetrate to the utmost depths of his purpose, whatever it might be. Perhaps, thought I, I may get him as much in my power as Guissac is in his, and thereby be enabled to secure more effectually

than ever the love of Stephanie by stepping in between the two. And had I not sworn but an hour ago to do everything in my power to save her father from punishment? How powerful an oath becomes when seconded by inclination! "I am prepared," said I, "for everything short of losing her!"

"This, then, will tell you the rest," replied M. Biot, producing from a portfolio I had observed in his hand when he entered, a paper, which, when he had opened and presented to me, I had no difficulty in recognizing at the first glance as one of those which I had seen lying before himself and his three companions on my first visit to his house. He handed me at the same time a smaller paper, which proved to be a key to the cipher in which, with the exception of the signatures, the document was written.

I had suspected it all; yet how my blood ran cold when the flagrant reality, in characters undeniable and as immoveable as a trembling hand allowed of, was spread before my eyes! -no longer the unsteady vapour of suspicion, but the fell coherence of recorded purpose! At that time (and is it not so even as I write ?) the fate of Europe hung upon one life. A strange life it is! a lurid centre redly haloed with fearful brightness! a life fitfully blessed and fitfully cursed! externally magnificent, internally- who knows what? perchance selfconsuming in the hell of his own glory; perchance utterly unreflective, and instinctively impelled through good and evil towards a great life-purpose; perchance better, perchance worse than all these, but surely a life sacred, divinely sacred!

And this life the assassin's hand was to cut short! The paper contained a plan of operations, and an awful oath of secresy. Besides the four names I had formerly remarked, several others, all Italian, were now affixed to it. In the mysterious fascination of horror I read it and re-read it, feeling in my utter bewilderment of thought as if I had already signed it, and were irretrievably implicated. M. Biot stood opposite me with his arms folded, as calmly observant as a physician might be when watching the effect of poison on some devoted member of the brute creation.

Even now, could I not throw off this yoke of bondage? I had seen the worst, and cursed my curiosity. Could I not, now, tell him boldly that I knew of his deception, and afterwards find Stephanie in her own sphere and character? Yet this fatal curiosity had laid a duty upon me, failing which the weight of blood would rest on my own head. I must not only withdraw from this diabolical conspiracy: I must overturn it! Yet how overturn it without informing against the conspirators? And how this without involving Stephanie herself? Oh, horror! Was I prepared for such a sacrifice? Could I allow her to be condemned for appearances of which I myself was in a great measure the cause, which indeed would never have existed had I steadily pursued the path of integrity? Was there not within me at that moment, not the whisper, but