“’Godfroid de Bouillon, Comte de Bechamel, Grandee of Spain and Prince of Volovento, in our Assembly what was the oath you swore?’ The old man writhed as he remembered its terrific purport.

“Though my heart was racked with agony, and I would have died, aye, cheerfully” (died, indeed, as if that were a penalty!) “to spare yonder lovely child a pang, I said to her calmly, ’Blanche de Bechamel, did Goby de Mouchy tell you secret number three?’

“She whispered a oui that was quite faint, faint and small.  But her poor father fell in convulsions at her feet.

“She died suddenly that night.  Did I not tell you those I love come to no good?  When General Bonaparte crossed the Saint Bernard, he saw in the convent an old monk with a white beard, wandering about the corridors, cheerful and rather stout, but mad—­mad as a March hare.  ‘General,’ I said to him, ’did you ever see that face before?’ He had not.  He had not mingled much with the higher classes of our society before the Revolution.  I knew the poor old man well enough; he was the last of a noble race, and I loved his child.”

“And did she die by—?”

“Man! did I say so?  Do I whisper the secrets of the Vehmgericht?  I say she died that night:  and he—­he, the heartless, the villain, the betrayer,—­you saw him seated in yonder curiosity shop, by yonder guillotine, with his scoundrelly head in his lap.

“You saw how slight that instrument was?  It was one of the first which Guillotin made, and which he showed to private friends in a hangar in the Rue Picpus, where he lived.  The invention created some little conversation among scientific men at the time, though I remember a machine in Edinburgh of a very similar construction, two hundred—­well, many, many years ago—­and at a breakfast which Guillotin gave he showed us the instrument, and much talk arose among us as to whether people suffered under it.

“And now I must tell you what befell the traitor who had caused all this suffering.  Did he know that the poor child’s death was a sentence?  He felt a cowardly satisfaction that with her was gone the secret of his treason.  Then he began to doubt.  I had means to penetrate all his thoughts, as well as to know his acts.  Then he became a slave to a horrible fear.  He fled in abject terror to a convent.  They still existed in Paris; and behind the walls of Jacobins the wretch thought himself secure.  Poor fool!  I had but to set one of my somnambulists to sleep.  Her spirit went forth and spied the shuddering wretch in his cell.  She described the street, the gate, the convent, the very dress which he wore, and which you saw to-day.

“And now this is what happened.  In his chamber in the Rue St. Honore, at Paris, sat a man alone—­a man who has been maligned, a man who has been called a knave and charlatan, a man who has been persecuted even to the death, it is said, in Roman Inquisitions, forsooth, and elsewhere.  Ha! ha!  A man who has a mighty will.