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As they journeyed to the morning-room Hugh Tryon said: “Does M. Laflamme still come to paint Miss Wyndham?”

“Yes; but it ends to-morrow, and then no more of that. Prisoners are prisoners, and though Laflamme is agreeable that makes it the more difficult.”

“Why should he be treated so well, as a first-class prisoner, and others of the Commune be so degraded here–as Mayer, for instance?”

“It is but a question of degree. He was an artist and something of a dramatist; he was not at the Place Vendome at a certain critical moment; he was not at Montmartre at a particular terrible time; he was not a high officer like Mayer; he was young, with the face of a patriot. Well, they sent Mayer to the galleys at Toulon first; then, among the worst of the prisoners here–he was too bold, too full of speech; he had not Laflamme’s gift of silence, of pathos. Mayer works coarsely, severely here; Laflamme grows his vegetables, idles about Ducos, swings in his hammock, and appears at inspections the picture of docility. One day he sent to me the picture of my wife framed in gold–here it is. Is it not charming? The size of a franc-piece and so perfect! You know the soft hearts of women.”

“You mean that Madame Solde–“

“She persuaded me to let him come here to paint my portrait. He has done so, and now he paints Marie Wyndham. But–“

“But?–Yes?”

“But these things have their dangers.”

“Have their dangers,” Hugh Tryon musingly repeated, and then added under his breath almost, “Escape or–“

“Or something else,” the Governor rather sharply interrupted; and then, as they were entering the room, gaily continued: “Ah, here we come, mademoiselle, to pay–“

“To pay your surplus of compliments, monsieur le Gouverneur. I could not help but hear something of what you said,” responded Marie, and gave her hand to Tryon.

“I leave you to mademoiselle’s tender mercies, monsieur,” said the Governor. “Au revoir!”

When he had gone, Hugh said: “You are gay today.”

“Indeed, no, I am sad.”

“Wherefore sad? Is nickel proving a drug? Or sugar a failure? Don’t tell me that your father says sugar is falling.” He glanced at the letter, which she unconsciously held in her hand.

She saw his look, smoothed the letter a little nervously between her palms, and put it into her pocket, saying: “No, my father has not said that sugar is falling–but come here, will you?” and she motioned towards the open window. When there, she said slowly, “That is what makes me sad and sorry,” and she pointed to the Semaphore upon the Hill of Pains.

“You are too tender-hearted,” he remarked. “A convict has escaped; he will be caught perhaps–perhaps not; and things will go on as before.”

“Will go on as before. That is, the ‘martinet’ worse than the ‘knout de Russe’; the ‘poucettes’, the ‘crapaudine’ on neck and ankles and wrists; all, all as bad as the ‘Pater Noster’ of the Inquisition, as Mayer said the other day in the face of Charpentier, the Commandant of the penitentiary. How pleasant also to think of the Boulevard de Guillotine! I tell you it is brutal, horrible. Think of what prisoners have to suffer here, whose only crime is that they were of the Commune; that they were just a little madder than other Frenchmen.”

“Pardon me if I say that as brutal things were done by the English in Tasmania.”

“Think of two hundred and sixty strokes of the ‘cat.'”

“You concern yourself too much about these things, I fear.”

“I only think that death would be easier than the life of half of the convicts here.”

“They themselves would prefer it, perhaps.”

“Tell me, who is the convict that has escaped?” she feverishly asked. “Is it a political prisoner?”

“You would not know him. He was one of the Commune who escaped shooting in the Place de la Concorde. Carbourd, I think, was his name.”

“Carbourd, Carbourd,” she repeated, and turned her head away towards the Semaphore.