He caught Juliette’s eyes fixed upon him with an intensity of gaze which, in that same one mad moment, revealed to him the depths of her love.  Then the second’s weakness was gone; he was once more quiet, firm, the man of action, accustomed to meet danger boldly, to rule and to subdue the most turgid mob.

With a quiet shrug of the shoulders, he dismissed all thought of the compromising lettercase, and went to the door.

Already, as no reply had come to the third word of command, it had been thrown open from outside, and Deroulede found himself face to face with the five men.

“Citizen Merlin!” he said quietly, as he recognised the foremost among them.

“Himself, Citizen-Deputy,” rejoined the latter, with a sneer, “at your service.”

Anne Mie, in a remote corner of the hall, had heard the name, and felt her very soul sicken at its sound.

Merlin!  Author of that infamous Law of the Suspect which had set man against man, a father against his son, brother against brother, and friend against friend, had made of every human creature a bloodhound on the track of his fellowmen, dogging in order not to be dogged, denouncing, spying, hounding, in order not to be denounced.

And he, Merlin, gloried in this, the most fiendishly evil law ever perpetrated for the degradation of the human race.

There is that sketch of him in the Musee Carnavalet, drawn just before he, in his turn, went to expiate his crimes on that very guillotine, which he had sharpened and wielded so powerfully against his fellows.  The artist has well caught the slouchy, slovenly look of his loosely knit figure, his long limbs and narrow head, with the snakelike eyes and slightly receding chin.  Like Marat, his model and prototype, Merlin affected dirty, ragged clothes.  The real Sanscullottism, the downward levelling of his fellowmen to the lowest rung of the social ladder, pervaded every action of this noted product of the great Revolution.

Even Deroulede, whose entire soul was filled with a great, all-understanding pity for the weaknesses of mankind, recoiled at sight of this incarnation of the spirit of squalor and degradation, of all that was left of the noble Utopian theories of the makers of the Revolution.

Merlin grinned when he saw Deroulede standing there, calm, impassive, well dressed, as if prepared to receive an honoured guest, rather than a summons to submit to the greatest indignity a proud man has ever been called upon to suffer.

Merlin had always hated the popular Citizen-Deputy.  Friend and boon-companion of Marat and his gang, he had for over two years now exerted all the influence he possessed in order to bring Deroulede under a cloud of suspicion.

But Deroulede had the ear of the populace.  No one understood as he did the tone of a Paris mob; and the National Convention, ever terrified of the volcano it had kindled, felt that a popular member of its assembly was more useful alive than dead.