." The moon had sunk low down behind a bank of clouds.

In the east a soft grey light was beginning to chase away the heavy mantle of the night.
He could only see her graceful outline now, the small queenly head, with its wealth of reddish golden curls, and the glittering gems forming the small, star-shaped, red flower which she wore as a diadem in her hair.
"Twenty-four hours after our marriage, Madame, the Marquis de St.Cyr and all his family perished on the guillotine, and the popular rumour reached me that it was the wife of Sir Percy Blakeney who helped to send them there." "Nay! I myself told you the truth of that odious tale." "Not till after it had been recounted to me by strangers, with all its horrible details." "And you believed them then and there," she said with great vehemence, "without a proof or question--you believed that I, whom you vowed you loved more than life, whom you professed you worshipped, that _I_ could do a thing so base as these STRANGERS chose to recount.

You thought I meant to deceive you about it all--that I ought to have spoken before I married you: yet, had you listened, I would have told you that up to the very morning on which St.Cyr went to the guillotine, I was straining every nerve, using every influence I possessed, to save him and his family.

But my pride sealed my lips, when your love seemed to perish, as if under the knife of that same guillotine.

Yet I would have told you how I was duped! Aye! I, whom that same popular rumour had endowed with the sharpest wits in France! I was tricked into doing this thing, by men who knew how to play upon my love for an only brother, and my desire for revenge.