liver up a certain packet of papers, of which she was either the possessor or of which she knew the place of concealment. It was but a trifling favour they asked from her; it might add some years of liberty to a life already doomed to incarceration; it might save that life itself. They sent the almoner of the prison to her, a worthy ecclesiastic, with an oily smile and a sugared tongue. He called her his dear erring child, his strayed lamb, his stricken dove; he spoke of that Mercy which is Infinite; he touched, now on the chastisements of this world, whose severity, by prudence, might be mitigated,-now on the punishments of the next, which no human art, no human cunning, could evade. Was it not better, after all, to transiger avec la Justice? Was it not worth while to try and mollify the furies, who were already plaiting their scorpion-whips for her? She was deaf to persuasions and deaf to entreaty. The old fiend came up within her, and made her incurably stubborn and rebellious. It was thus when she was a child, and could have avoided punishment by saying one little word, and would not say it, and suffered stripes and hunger and solitary durance. No, she would not say the word now; no, she would not give up the thing they wanted. No, she would NOT. Let them send her to the travaux forcés for life; let them shave her head, and dress her in the infamous gray flannel of the convict; let them drag her to the Place de la Roquette, and subject her to the same awful fate as that which Madame Laffarge so narrowly escaped; let them cut her to pieces, let them roast her over a slow fire: she was in their power, and they could do with her as it seemed best to them ;-but she would not say the word, and she would not deliver up the secret.

The tactics of her gaolers changed; the pious almoner, with oily smile and sugared tongue, kept away. He would return no more, they told her in threatening tones, until the morrow of her condemnation to death, until the dawn of her execution-day. In lieu of the priest came a harsh prison-director, came the substitute of the Procurator of the Republic, with bitter reproach and stern menace. She must be subdued, they said. Her writing materials, her books, were taken away from her. The breadand-water diet was resumed. She had been searched in London at the police-office, where Simon Lefranc had first taken her. She had been searched again at the Prefecture on her first arrival in Paris. She was again delivered over to the horrible crooked fingers of La Mère Camuse. It was then she began to bite and scratch and kick and struggle; it was then they put the degrading camisole de force upon her.

And so God's sun, that shines for all, cast his radiance upon this wretched, forlorn, hopeless sinner, for she had no hope left. She had ceased even to trust in her Influence. She was in a rage at her capture, as a tigress might be in a rage when caught in the toils. She hated herself; and could see, in her soul's mirror, how black and stained with loathsome crimes she was; but she did not repent. They would kill her now, she supposed; let them. The guillotine was the last infliction she could suffer in this life and beyond that? She saw the Place de la Roquette, two

tall posts, the board on rollers, the impending knife, the long red basket filled with saw-dust. She felt in imagination the cold steel of the executioner's scissors, as he sheared her shining tresses from the back of her neck to give the axe's edge full play. And she felt the last awful stroke; heard the heavy thud of the axe as it fell: that was death of a surety; but beyond that was nothing but a huge, black, boundless, and eternal voyage. Was ever woman in worse case than this?

On the morning when the sun was shining, there came a tap at the wicket of her cell; and the Judas-hole was opened, and an impudent face peered through the grating.

"Open, Mère Camuse," said the voice of Simon Lefranc; "oper, and let us look at our little caged bird."

The searcher gave admission to the Chief of the Spies, who had ingress every where.

"You can wait outside for a few minutes," Simon said, sauntering into the dungeon with his hands in his pockets, his hat on one side, and his heart on his sleeve as usual.

The old woman began to grumble a little, and plead her orders not to leave her prisoner alone even for a moment; but Simon put her aside with a confident shrug and a confident grin, telling her that she knew the prisoner was perfectly safe with him, and that if he could not manage her, the whole body of the French police, gendarmerie, spies, and political agents to boot, would be unequal to the task. So the Mère Camuse, still grumbling, but quite subservient, surrendered her key of office to the spy, and submitted to be locked out. Simon took the additional precaution of shutting the trap of the Judas-hole, which could be pulled inwards if a certain spring was touched. Then he advanced to where the prisoner sat on her truckle-bed, haggard and wan, in the sunshine; then ne pulled a stool towards her, and sat down facing his caged bird; then he produced his never-failing cigar-case, took out a Trabuco, bit off the tip, moistened the stump, kindled a fusee on the sole of his boot, lighted his cigar, crossed one leg over the other, rested one hand on his hip, one elbow on his knee, and, tranquilly emitting little skeins of smoke, contemplated the prisoner with quite a paternal air.

"And how is our little bird?" he asked, in a tone that was meant to be soothing, and might have been so had it not been inconceivably insolent.

The little bird made, as well as her muffled hands would allow her, a gesture of disdain, and uttered an inarticulate murmur of repugnance towards her visitor.

"Come, come; we must not be angry with our Simon; we must not grieve the heart of our good Papa."

At the word Papa the thoughts of Florence Armytage darted, straight as an arrow from the Tartar's bow, three hundred miles away from that dreary Conciergerie cell to an up-stair room in a boarding-house at Bayswater, where a man with the face of a ruffian was working in a little

laboratory,—she lounging in a great easy-chair, he laughing and joking as he poured one liquid from one phial to another, and calling her his Florence and his darling, and saying that he would find out the great secret yet, and make all their fortunes.

"Papa!" Mrs. Armytage almost mechanically repeated, but with an accent of bitter scorn.

"Yes, Papa," resumed Simon, "Grandpapa, Uncle, Cousin, Guardian, every thing now except Judge and Jury. We must be obedient to our Papa; we must listen to what he says for his own satisfaction and our own good. Else things will go hardly with us. They have gone a little hardly with us lately. Eh, ma mie?” She groaned bitterly.

muttered.

"They have indeed, Heaven knows," she

"That is because we have been naughty. Naughty children must be punished; when they are good, they are kissed, and have bon-bons given them we have been punished with the camisole de force, and bread and water, and the attentions of the Mère Camuse. Would we not like to be good, and have our books and papers back again? have a nice little roast chicken and a bottle of Moselle for dinner? and wear a nice morning-wrapper instead of that ugly camisole, and take a walk in the courtyard and see the sky, and a green tree or two, and the faces of our fellowcreatures ?"

"I should like to be out of this place," said Mrs. Armytage. "I would be sooner torn to pieces by wild-horses than remain in it two days longer. Why don't they try me, and send me to the galleys at once?"

"They don't send ladies to the galleys in this polite country, ma petite maman," replied Simon; "they send them to a nice little maison centrale, where they shave their heads, and put them to nice hard work. Besides, do you know, mon ange, that you have done some funny little things that M. le Procureur de la République knows all about, and which may lead him to demand, not that you be sent to the galleys, but that your pretty little head be cut off?"

"I am not guilty," said Mrs. Armytage.

"Bah!” cried the spy, rising, knocking the ash off his cigar, changing his tone as he did so from banter to harshness. "A d'autres, ces contes jaunes. Listen to me, Widow Armytage; listen to me, woman with halfa-dozen names and half-a-thousand crimes; listen to me, forger, murderess, swindler, thief! You will not be tried before you have been found guilty between the four walls of this cell, or those of the cabinet of the examining judge. Little by little the Act of Accusation has been building up; it will not take the jury ten minutes to decide your fate; it will not take the Advocate-General twenty minutes to plead your head off your white shoulders. Justice has got hold of you, my pet; that Justice which never loosens its grip till the bird is dead, or the mouse is torn to pieces. You are in the claws of the cat of the Palace of Justice. La chatte que ne perd jamais son rat. Do you want to live or die ?”

"I want to have this strait-waistcoat taken off, and to be allowed to comb my hair." Her poor golden ringlets! they were indeed wofully dishevelled.

"The only way to have your wish, the only way to save your life, is to reply to that which has been asked of you,-is to render up those papers which you have, or of which you know the hiding-place." "Indeed!"

"Will you consent?"

"No! a thousand times no!"

"Under those circumstances," said Simon Lefranc, again returning to his tone of bantering politeness, "I have the honour to wish you, Madame Armytage, a very good morning. A few more questions will shortly be put to you by some one who has even more authority than I have to ask them, and who will perhaps be more successful in his interrogations."

He moved towards the door, unlocked it, and went out into the corridor; then gave some whispered orders in a low tone to the Mère Camuse, and so departed. Five minutes after he was lounging, with his hat on one side, and his hands in his pockets, and his heart upon his sleeve, through the great Hall of the Lost Footsteps; and as he paced those wellworn flags he said mentally, "We have but one more resource left,-the locket, and that, I think, will not fail us."

The female turnkey did not inflict her abhorred presence upon the prisoner for a full half-hour after the departure of Simon Lefranc; then she entered the cell accompanied by another assistant, almost as tall, and quite as forbidding in appearance, as herself. Florence Armytage turned to see what new tortures were in store for her. To her surprise, the two women approached her with something like gentleness in their manner, and addressed her in language which was almost kind. They took from her the hated camisole de force; they had brought with them a bundle containing a suit of her own apparel, rich and dainty as she was wont to wear; not, however, the toilet in which she had been taken prisoner, but another. In this they would with their own hands have attired her; but, with an invincible feeling of repulsion, she declined the services of these ghastly chamber-maids, and when bidden to dress herself, did so with much meekness. They let her comb her pretty hair, holding a mirror for her as she arranged it in the old fascinating clusters of ringlets. They gave her a bonnet, a glistening toy of ribbons and beads and feathers; they gave her a pair of her old Houbigant six-and-a-quarter gloves; they gave her a cambric handkerchief, artfully scented; they even, with a sardonic smile, offered her some rouge. She allowed them to lace her little bottines, those wonderful little bottines the heels of which had been so often tapped in pretty petulance on the soft carpets, those bottines which had covered the little feet that had trodden so often the paths of vanity and vice and crime. Then they gave her her parasol, and bade her put her Brussels lace veil down; and, but that she had no jewels, no chains of gold, but that she had no little dog to follow her, but

that her face was deadly pale, and that there were livid lines under her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, she was the old Florence Armytage of the golden ringlets and the rustling drapery.

They asked her if she would have some refreshment; and all proud and rebellious as the little woman had been, she valued her creaturecomforts too highly not to accept an improvement in her bill-of-fare, when it could be accepted without making damaging concessions. So with sufficient appetite, yet in somewhat of a mechanical manner likewise, she ate a little meat and drank a little wine, and felt a little stronger for that which was to come next: what that was to be, she did not know. She waited after this repast another full half-hour, then another tap came to the wicket, and one of the huissiers of the Palace, a grave man in black, with a silver chain round his neck, entered the cell, accompanied by two gendarmes.

"The Widow Armytage," said the huissier, in as sonorous a tone as though he had been addressing a crowded audience instead of a wretched prisoner, to the gaolers, "is summoned to appear before M. le Juge d'Instruction in his cabinet. Widow Armytage, you will accompany me."

The Widow Armytage rose submissively from the truckle-bed, where she had been sitting ready dressed. A gendarme placed himself on either side of her, and the huissier preceding, the little procession passed through the door, and began to move through the corridors of the prison.

The two she-gaolers were left together.

"Her affair will soon be settled," said the Mère Camuse, beginning to arrange the prisoner's bed.

"Not so soon, perhaps, as you imagine," replied the second harridan. "She will give M. le Juge d'Instruction, and the whole Palace of Justice into the bargain, more trouble than half-a-dozen brigands and assassins. Une fameuse! Allez."

"What is she accused of?" said the Mère Camuse. "I know she nearly kicked me to pieces, and bit my hand through, when I was making my little perquisitions."

"How do I know?" replied the other; "it is none of our business to inquire. We shall know soon enough when the Court of Assizes opens."

You see that they manage these things so much better in France.

The corridors and the passages through which the gendarmes, the huissier, and Florence Armytage passed, the staircases they ascended and descended, seemed interminable. Once they emerged into a narrow iron gallery, running along the wall, but close to the roof of the great Hall of the Lost Footsteps. The gendarmes kept closer to Florence as they traversed this gallery. She could look down, however, and see far below on the pavement the straggling groups of weary suitors nibbling oystershells; the little knots of black-capped, black-robed advocates swallowing fat oysters. She did not see, but was clearly seen by, our friend with his