“Who goes there?”

“Public Safety,” replied Chauvelin.  “Who are you?”

“Of the Surete,” was the counter reply.  “There are a dozen of us about here.”

“When did you arrive?”

“Some two hours ago.  We marched out directly after you left the orders at the Commissariat.”

“You are prepared to remain on the watch all night?”

“Those are our orders, citizen,” replied the man.

“You had best close up round the house, then.  And, name of a dog!” he added, with a threatening ring in his voice.  “Let there be no slackening of vigilance this night.  No one to go in or out of that house, no one to approach it under any circumstances whatever.  Is that understood?”

“Those were our orders from the first, citizen,” said the man simply.

“And all has been well up to now?”

“We have seen no one, citizen.”

The little party closed in around their chief and together they marched up to the house.  Chauvelin, on tenterhooks, walked quicker than the others.  He was the first to reach the door.  Unable to find the bell-pull in the dark, he knocked vigorously.

The house appeared silent and wrapped in sleep.  No light showed from within save that one tiny speck through the cracks of an ill-fitting shutter, in a room immediately overhead.

In response to Chauvelin’s repeated summons, there came anon the sound of someone moving in one of the upstairs rooms, and presently the light overhead disappeared, whilst a door above was heard to open and to close and shuffling footsteps to come slowly down the creaking stairs.

A moment or two later the bolts and bars of the front door were unfastened, a key grated in the rusty lock, a chain rattled in its socket, and then the door was opened slowly and cautiously.

The woman Leridan appeared in the doorway.  She held a guttering tallow candle high above her head.  Its flickering light illumined Chauvelin’s slender figure.

“Ah! the citizen Representative!” the woman ejaculated, as soon as she recognised him.  “We did not expect you again to-day, and at this late hour, too.  I’ll tell my man—­”

“Never mind your man,” broke in Chauvelin impatiently, and pushed without ceremony past the woman inside the house.  “The child?  Is it safe?”

He could scarcely control his excitement.  There was a buzzing, as of an angry sea, in his ears.  The next second, until the woman spoke, seemed like a cycle of years.

“Quite safe, citizen,” she said placidly.  “Everything is quite safe.  We were so thankful for those men of the Surete.  We had been afraid before, as I told the citizen Representative, and my man and I could not rest for anxiety.  It was only after they came that we dared go to bed.”

A deep sigh of intense relief came from the depths of Chauvelin’s heart.  He had not realised himself until this moment how desperately anxious he had been.  The woman’s reassuring words appeared to lift a crushing weight from his mind.  He turned to the man behind him.