The young man held it to the other and spoke.  “It was my mother’s,” he said, with an appealing glance of violet eyes; “I would not part with it but that I am starving.  Will you get me food?”

“You are hiding?” said he of the red cap.

“Is that a crime in these days?” said the other, with a smile that would in other days have been irresistible.

The man took the watch, shaded the donor’s beautiful face with a rough red cap and tricolour ribbon, and bade him follow him.  He, who had but lately come to Paris, dragged his exhausted body after his conductor, hardly noticed the crowds in the streets, the signs by which the man got free passage for them both, or their entrance by a little side-door into a large dark building, and never knew till he was delivered to one of the gaolers that he had been led into the prison of the Abbaye.  Then the wretch tore the cap of Liberty from his victim’s head, and pointed to him with a fierce laugh.

“He wants food, this aristocrat.  He shall not wait long—­there is a feast in the court below, which he shall join presently.  See to it, Antoine!  And you, Monsieur, Mons-ieur! listen to the banqueters.”

He ceased, and in the silence yells and cries from a court below came up like some horrid answer to imprecation.

The man continued—­

“He has paid for his admission, this Monsieur.  It belonged to Madame his mother.  Behold!”

He held the watch above his head, and dashed it with insane fury on the ground, and, bidding the gaoler see to his prisoner, rushed away to the court below.

The prisoner needed some attention.  Weakness, and fasting, and horror had overpowered a delicate body and a sensitive mind, and he lay senseless by the shattered relic of happier times.  Antoine, the gaoler (a weak-minded man whom circumstances had made cruel), looked at him with indifference while the Jacobin remained in the place, and with half-suppressed pity when he had gone.  The place where he lay was a hall or passage in the prison, into which several cells opened, and a number of the prisoners were gathered together at one end of it.  One of them had watched the proceedings of the Jacobin and his victim with profound interest, and now advanced to where the poor youth lay.  He was a priest, and though thirteen years had passed over his head since we saw him in the chateau, and though toil and suffering and anxiety had added the traces of as many more, yet it would not have been difficult to recognize the towering height, the candid face, and, finally, the large thumb in the little book of ——­, Monsieur the Preceptor, who had years ago exchanged his old position for a parochial cure.  He strode up to the gaoler (whose head came a little above the priest’s elbow), and, drawing him aside, asked, with his old abruptness, “Who is this?”

“It is the Vicomte de B——.  I know his face.  He has escaped the commissaires for some days.”