“You’re quite safe, cherie,” said a woman’s voice, and fingers were undoing the cloth which was bound round Jeanne’s head.  “You’re quite safe.  No one in Paris would think of looking for you here.”

The cloth fell off, and Jeanne, half dazed, only partly understanding what had happened, looked about her.  Her companion, an old woman with a tri-color cockade fastened to her dress, watched her.

The room, one of two opening into each other, was small, mean, yet fresh and dainty.  Cheap curtains hung before the windows and about the alcove where the bed was; the curtains and the paintwork were white, two or three cheap prints were upon the walls, a strip of carpet and a rug lay on the polished boards.

“Where am I?” Jeanne asked.

“In safety,” answered the old woman.

So Mademoiselle St. Clair came at last to the rooms which Raymond Latour had so carefully prepared.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE AMBITION OF RAYMOND LATOUR

The dawn came slowly creeping over Paris, cold and with a whip of gusty rain in it.  It stole in to touch the faces of many sleepers, innocent sleepers, in hiding and in prison, who for a little while had forgotten their fear and peril; brutal sleepers who for a little space lay harmless, heavy with satisfied lust and wine.  It stole into empty rooms, rooms that should be occupied; into Legrand’s house in the Rue Charonne where two beds had not been slept in; into hovels in narrow byways of the city to which men and women had not returned last night, but had spent the sleeping hours, as befitted such patriots, in revelry and songs and wine.  It stole into a little room with cheap white curtains, and looked upon a woman who had thrown herself half dressed on the bed and had fallen asleep, tired out, exhausted.  It crept into a room below and touched the figure of a man seated by the table.  A lamp stood near him, but either he had turned it out, or it had burned out; an open book was before him, but he had read little, and no knowledge of what he had read remained.  For hours he had sat there in darkness, but no sleep had come to him.  The night had been a long waking dream of things past, and present, and the future a confusion of thoughts which could not be reduced to any order.  All the threads of a great scheme were in his hands, yet he was uncertain how to use them to the best advantage.  The moment he had struggled for had come.  This day, this dawn, was the beginning of the future.  How was he to make the best of it?

Presently he was conscious of feeling cold, and he made himself some coffee, moving about his room quietly.  He remembered the woman upstairs.  She was sleeping, surely.  He had listened during the night and had not heard her.  He had held her in his arms, had carried her up the stairs and placed her gently in a chair, leaving her in the care of the woman from the baker’s shop at the corner of the alley.  She would wake presently and he would see her.  What should he say to her?