“There’s another pistol shot if you move,” cried Seth, with one foot in the stirrup.

It is doubtful whether the threat would have stopped him, but the two men suddenly running towards him through the trees did.  He knew them and they were not expected.

Barrington and Seth seized the opportunity, and putting spurs to their horses were riding towards the head of the valley which led down to the frontier.  They broke into a gallop as soon as they reached the road, and for some time neither of them spoke.

“Had we waited the whole of Beauvais would have been upon us.  All’s fair in war.”

“And in love, they say,” Barrington added.

A low growl expressed Seth’s opinion on this point.

“Right, Seth, right,” was the bitter answer.  “I have had my lesson, and enough of women for a lifetime.  You have your wish.  We ride alone to Paris.”

The two men who entered the wood as Barrington and Seth rode out of it were lackeys, and ran to their master.

“Monsieur!  Monsieur!”

“What is it?” he asked with an angry oath.

“Monsieur, there is some mistake.  Mademoiselle St. Clair left Beauvais last night before the dance was over at the chateau.”

CHAPTER VI

TWO PRODUCTS OF THE REVOLUTION

In the Rue Valette, a street of long memory, down which many students had passed dreaming, Calvin not least among them, there was a baker’s shop at the corner of an alley.  Students still walked the streets, and others, dreaming too, after a fashion, but not much of books.  In these days there were other things to dream of.  Life moved quickly, crowdedly, down the Rue Valette, and this baker’s shop had gathered more than one crowd about it in recent days.  Life and such a shop Were linked together, linked, too, with government.  Give us bread, was one of the earliest cries in the Revolution.  Is not bread, the baker’s shop, the real center of all revolutions?

Behind this shop, entered by the alley, was a narrow courtyard, not too clean a depository for rubbish and broken articles, for refuse as well, which on hot days sent contamination into the air.  A doorway, narrow and seldom closed, gave directly on to a stairway, and on the first landing, straight in front of the stairs, was a door always closed, usually locked, yet at a knock it would be immediately opened.  Behind it two rooms adjoined, their windows looking into the court.  The furniture was sparse and common, the walls were bare, no more than a worn rug was upon the floor, but on a hanging shelf there were books, and paper and pens were on a table pushed against the wall near the window.  The lodging of a poor student, a descendant, and little altered, of generations of students’ lodgings known in this city of Paris since it had first been recognized as the chief seat of learning in Europe.