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How he ever got there, or when, I do not now, nor will I ever, know, but when I looked up Marcel was standing before me.

“M. Granger,” said he, abruptly, “it will be necessary for you to seek another lodging.”

“Why?”

“I would do you a service. The proof lies in the future. This house is doomed.”

“Poor Marcel,” said I, with genuine pity, “some recent trouble has turned your brain!”

“Mad!” he replied, laughing bitterly. “The wonder is that I am not. For years I have been hunted,–hunted like a dog. Prisons have been my dwelling-place, disguises my only clothing. My pillow is a spy; the very atmosphere I breathe is analyzed.”

“And what is your offense?”

“A desire to live as the great God intended an Italian should. A desire to lift to his place among the free-born the corrupt descendant of Coriolanus, now nourishing his miserable body on the scudi extorted from a stranger’s patience. The vile crew whom our ancestors drove howling and naked across the Danube, in undisturbed apathy gloat over our dearest treasures. Our people are ground into the dust; our women, stripped in the market-place, shriek under the pitiless lash of the oppressor. One man, sworn to protect Italy with his life, can save her, and has refused. That man dies.”

“And you are pledged to kill him?”

“I am pledged to see you safely without these walls by this day fortnight.”

“And you?”

“I remain.”

“Marcel, you are crazy.”

“M. Granger, you are polite.”

That night fortnight I was away; and this was the message that sent me:

“TO M. ARTHUR GRANGER:

“Your fatal discovery on the morning of my departure makes you the only man to whom I can appeal. Let me pray the appeal be not in vain. In the folly of my youth, while sojourning in Italy, I joined a powerful secret order, whose demands cease only with death, and whose penalty for denial is a sudden and bloody end. You can judge, then, my anxiety on being compelled to admit to my establishment, disguised as a servant, one of its highest officers, and my horror at hearing of his abrupt departure. Since then I have learned the unhappy cause. My life is in another’s hands. It is for him to command, and for me blindly to obey. There are two beings in this world dearer to me than my soul’s salvation. To you, M. Granger, as a Christian gentleman, I commend them. The sealed note inclosed (the contents of which are a matter of life and death) I beg you will at once deliver to my wife; and let me conjure you, until the crisis is over, to make my house at Romainville your home.

“EDOUARD PONTALBA.”

Leaf the Last.

This is the 15th of January, 1858. France is in a blaze of excitement. Last evening, in the Rue Lepelletier, an attempt was made to assassinate the Emperor, by throwing grenades filled with fulminating mercury under the coach that bore the Imperial family to the Italian Opera. Count Felice Orsini, the murderer, himself desperately wounded, has been arrested, and Paris is crying for his blood.

For several days I have been the honored guest of Madame Althie Pontalba. It is a golden evening; the sky, an hour ago so clear and blue, is piled with golden clouds, and stretches out into golden rivers, with golden banks, flowing calmly down into a golden sea. The purple slates on the church-steeple, the red tiles on the house-tops, the gardens with their evergreens and jonquils and little blue violets shrinking out of the frosty air, are wrapped in a golden mist. The light streams through the windows in rays of pure gold, and trickles down the walls in little golden currents. It is an enchanting little villa. The steep gables covered with variegated slate, the thin fluted columns of the verandas, the diminutive marble steps, the broad bow-windows with their transparent plate-glass, look more like a fairy picture than a reality. The trim shrubbery, the airy little statues, and even the white palings, so frail and fanciful in their construction, are charmingly appropriate.