“You are wrong to have abandoned that hope,” he assured her.  “If this mayor is so well disposed, he certainly can do as his son promised.  But last night it would have been too late for him to have reached you, and to-day, assuming that he had come to Paris, almost impossible for him to win across the streets from the other side.  It is most likely that he will yet come.  I pray that he may; for the knowledge that you and Mlle. de Kercadiou are out of this would comfort me above all.”

“We should take you with us,” said madame.

“Ah!  But how?”

“Young Rougane was to bring me permits for three persons — Aline, myself, and my footman, Jacques.  You would take the place of Jacques.”

“Faith, to get out of Paris, madame, there is no man whose place I would not take.”  And he laughed.

Their spirits rose with his and their flagging hopes revived.  But as dusk descended again upon the city, without any sign of the deliverer they awaited, those hopes began to ebb once more.

M. de La Tour d’Azyr at last pleaded weariness, and begged to be permitted to withdraw that he might endeavour to take some rest against whatever might have to be faced in the immediate future.  When he had gone, madame persuaded Aline to go and lie down.

“I will call you, my dear, the moment he arrives,” she said, bravely maintaining that pretence of a confidence that had by now entirely evaporated.

Aline kissed her affectionately, and departed, outwardly so calm and unperturbed as to leave the Countess wondering whether she realized the peril by which they were surrounded, a peril infinitely increased by the presence in that house of a man so widely known and detested as M. de La Tour d’Azyr, a man who was probably being sought for by his enemies at this moment.

Left alone, madame lay down on a couch in the salon itself, to be ready for any emergency.  It was a hot summer night, and the glass doors opening upon the luxuriant garden stood wide to admit the air.  On that air came intermittently from the distance sounds of the continuing horrible activities of the populace, the aftermath of that bloody day.

Mme. de Plougastel lay there, listening to those sounds for upwards of an hour, thanking Heaven that for the present at least the disturbances were distant, dreading lest at any moment they should occur nearer at hand, lest this Bondy section in which her hotel was situated should become the scene of horrors similar to those whose echoes reached her ears from other sections away to the south and west.

The couch occupied by the Countess lay in shadow; for all the lights in that long salon had been extinguished with the exception of a cluster of candles in a massive silver candle branch placed on a round marquetry table in the middle of the room — an island of light in the surrounding gloom.