stood at Monsieur Gabelle's door.

Help, Gabelle! Help, every one!" The tocsin rang impatiently, but other help (if that were any) there was none. The mender of roads and two hundred and fifty particular friends stood with folded arms at the fountain, looking at the pillar of fire in the sky. "It must be forty feet high," said they, grimly; and never moved.

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The rider from the château and the horse in a foam clattered away through the village, and galloped up the stony steep to the prison on the crag. At the gate a group of officers were looking at the fire; removed from them, a group of soldiers. Help, gentlemen-officers! The château is on fire; valuable objects may be saved from the flames by timely aid! Help, help!" The officers looked towards the soldiers, who looked at the fire, gave no orders, and answered with shrugs and biting of lips, It must burn.'

As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street, the village was illuminating. The mender of roads and the two hundred and fifty particular friends, inspired as one man and woman by the idea of lighting up, had darted into their houses and were putting candles in every dull little pane of glass. The general scarcity of everything occasioned candles to be borrowed in a rather peremptory manner of Monsieur Gabelle; and in a moment of reluctance and hesitation on that functionary's part, the mender of roads, once so submissive to authority, had remarked that carriages were good to make bonfires with, and that post-horses would roast.

The château was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring and raging of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight from the infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away. With the rising and falling of the blaze the stone faces showed as if they were in torment. When great masses of stone and tim

ber fell, the face with the two dints in the nose became obscured: anon struggled out of the smoke again, as if it were the face of the cruel marquis burning at the stake and contending with the fire.

The château burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire, scorched and shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke. Molten lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain; the water ran dry; the extinguisher-tops of the towers vanished like ice before the heat, and trickled down into four rugged wells of flame. Great rents and splits branched out in the solid walls, like crystallisation; stupefied birds wheeled about and dropped into the furnace; four fierce figures trudged away, east, west, north, and south, along the nightenshrouded roads, guided by the beacon they had lighted, towards their next destination. The illuminated village had seized hold of the tocsin, and, abolishing the lawful ringer, rang for joy.

Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire, and bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do with the collection of rent and taxes—though it was but a small instalment of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in those latter days—became impatient for an interview with him, and, surrounding his house, summoned him to come forth for personal conference. Whereupon Monsieur Gabelle did heavily bar his door and retire to hold counsel with himself. The result of that conference was that Gabelle again withdrew himself to his house-top behind his stack of chimneys; this time resolved if his door were broken in (he was a small southern man of retaliative temperament), to pitch himself head foremost over the parapet and crush a man or two below.

Probably Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up

there, with the distant château for fire and candle, and the beating at his door, combined with the joy-ringing for music; not to mention his having an ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his posting-house gate, which the village showed a lively inclination to displace in his favour. A trying suspense, to be passing a whole summer night on the brink of the black ocean, ready to take that plunge into it upon which Monsieur Gabelle had resolved! But the friendly dawn appearing at last, and the rush-candles of the village guttering out, the people, happily, dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle came down bringing his life with him for that while.

Within a hundred miles, and within the light of other fires, there were other functionaries less fortunate that night and other nights, whom the rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful streets where they had been born and bred; also there were other villagers and townspeople less fortunate than the mender of roads and his fellows, upon whom the functionaries and soldiery turned with success, and whom they strung up in their turn. the fierce figures were steadily wending east, west, north, and south, be that as it would; and whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude of the gallows that would turn to water and quench it, no functionary, by any stretch of mathematics, was able to calculate successfully.

But

CHAPTER XXIV

DRAWN TO THE LOADSTONE ROCK

IN such risings of fire and risings of sea—the firm earth shaken by the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but was always on the flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on the shore -three years of tempest were consumed. Three more

birthdays of little Lucie had been woven by the golden thread into the peaceful tissue of the life of her home.

Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the echoes in the corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard the thronging feet. For the footsteps had become to their minds as the footsteps of a people, tumultuous under a red flag, and with their country declared in danger, changed into wild beasts by terrible enchantment long persisted in.

Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phenomenon of his not being appreciated; of his being so little wanted in France as to incur considerable danger of receiving his dismissal from it and this life together. Like the fabled rustic who raised the devil with infinite pains, and was so terrified at the sight of him that he could ask the enemy no question, but immediately fled; so Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord's Prayer backwards for a great number of years, and performing many other potent spells for compelling the evil one, no sooner beheld him in his terrors than he took to his noble heels.

The shining bull's-eye of the court was gone, or it would have been the mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never been a good eye to see with—had long had the mote in it of Lucifer's pride, Sardanapalus's luxury, and a mole's blindness—but it had dropped out and was gone. The court, from that exclusive inner circle to its outermost rotten ring of intrigue, corruption, and dissimulation, was all gone together. Royalty was gone; had been besieged in its palace and "suspended " when the last tidings came over.

The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two was come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered far and wide.

As was natural, the headquarters and great gathering

place of Monseigneur in London was Tellson's Bank. Spirits are supposed to haunt the places where their bodies most resorted, and Monseigneur without a guinea haunted the spot where his guineas used to be. Moreover it was the spot to which such French intelligence as was most to be relied upon came quickest. Again, Tellson's was a munificent house, and extended great liberality to old customers who had fallen from their high estate. Again, those nobles who had seen the coming storm in time, and anticipating plunder or confiscation, had made provident remittances to Tellson's, were always to be heard of there by their needy brethren. To which it must be added that every newcomer from France reported himself and his tidings at Tellson's almost as a matter of course. For such variety of reasons, Tellson's was at that time, as to French intelligence, a kind of high exchange; and this was so well known to the public, and the inquiries made there were in consequence so numerous, that Tellson's sometimes wrote the latest news out in a line or so and posted it at the bank windows for all who ran through Temple Bar to read.

On a steaming, misty afternoon Mr. Lorry sat at his desk, and Charles Darnay stood leaning on it, talking with him in a low voice. The penitential den once set apart for interviews with the House, was now the newsexchange, and was filled to overflowing. It was within half an hour or so of the time of closing.

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'But although you are the youngest man that ever lived," said Charles Darnay, rather hesitating, "I must still suggest to you

"I understand. That I am too old ?" said Mr. Lorry. "Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of travelling, a disorganised country, a city that may not be even safe for you."

"My dear Charles," said Mr. Lorry, with cheerful