"Heaven!" he cries, slapping his forehead,
"I am assassinated! He has done me! He has
escaped! The tide served at midnight!"

CHAPTER XXXVII. THE SCOURGE.

GILBERT, ill, feverish, hopeless, only waited
restlessly for news from the ball. He had sent
Margaret, who had promised him that a grand
coup would be struck, and that the punishment
she had so long promised would on this night
overtake the cruel and selfish. "Not that I
wish them punished. But how can I endure to
see them happy and prosperous? Yet I do pray
that it may be all ended for ever, this night,
between them."

"But how would that help you, dear Gilbert?"
said Constance. "Better cease to think of
them altogether."

"So you think, Constance, and so do I, if I
could. Is that Margaret? There she is! Come,
the news—quick! Is all at an end?—is all over?
—is he unmasked?"

Margaret was gloomy and excited. "I have
failed. They have been too crafty for me. My
long journey—all has failed."

"Failed!" he cried, starting up; "and they
are to be happy, while I am to live on in this
state of purgatory! Is there justice, or
Providence? I have tried to fight with this; but I
am helpless. Tell me," he went on, in this
excited way, raising himself up—"tell me
everything. What did they say?—how did she
look? Ah, you wont tell rne!"

It was not, indeed, Gilbert West who was
uttering these incoherencies; it was a fevered
and disordered brain. Then he sank back
exhausted, and they saw his wild eyes fixed
hopelessly on the ceiling. The two women
looked at each other, Constance despairingly,
Margaret desperately; and Margaret said,
between her teeth: " This is her doing!"

"Ah!" said Constance, impatiently, "that
is what has driven him to this. Working on
his sense of injury, inflaming him. It is sinful
and cruel!"

Margaret started, and surveyed her with
infuriated astonishment. She had never more
than tolerated this girl, and that simply because
Gilbert liked her. But now this tone
confounded her.

"Do you dare to interfere with me—to find
fault? I would give my heart's blood for him!"

"That is nothing," said Constance,
vehemently, "if you take his. This weary struggle
will kill him, and—and—I cannot stand by and
see it!"

She trembled at her own audacity. For
Constance hitherto had been a sort of little slave,
never objecting, always gently obsequious even.

"It is sinful and cruel," she went on,
trembling; "and false, too. For I do not believe,
as you would have him believe, that this girl
is so full of hatred and wickedness. She is
gentle and amiable, and there has been some
mistake, I know. And I warn you now to
stop this cruel inflaming of his mind with
suspicions. I will not see it done any longer!"

Margaret, dumb with wonder, could not
reply for a moment. She answered differently
from what might have been expected.

"I see through all this," she said. "You
are a mere fool; and, I warn you, don't think
of interfering with me. Keep out of my path,
I warn you. I know what will soothe him and
ease him; and I tell you that wicked girls,
women, or men shall find punishment!"

As she swept away, she seemed to have awe-
stricken Constance like one of the avenging
furies.

But Margaret scarcely thought of her. She
was indeed filled with that one idea—that
absorbing thought. She went to her room,
hastily and eagerly.

"They shall not have their triumph, and he
this degradation and suffering—their calm
happiness and sweet engagement, letter-writing,
constancy, and, at last, the happy return and
long wished-for marriage. Never! I shall do
it at all risks. This will spoil their jubilee."

And Margaret, going to her desk, took out what
she had carefully put by—one of the sheets of
note-paper with the picture of the Paris sanitary
establishment at the top. At that late hour, and
as she heard the hoarse chiming of the church-
clock by, she was busy over her task. Then some
one who was flitting about, keeping watch
uneasily, heard her go down-stairs; and then,
looking out of the window, the same watcher
saw her go up the street, deeply veiled and
wrapped in a shawl.

The doctor, who wrote on "Idiocy," was
right. For some time back, through the length
and breadth of France, dull, heavy rumours had
been drifting that a dreadful enemy, who came,
like a comet, at long intervals, approached
slowly, and ravaged the country, might soon
be looked for. An epidemic, that seemed
more terrible than it is now; for it was
unfamiliar, and medical men knew not how to deal
with it. It was known to have reached France.
It seemed to come with the solemn steady strides
of a fell giant. People fled before the monster
in a frightened herd—that is, the people of
condition and substance. A great deal of his
ravages were owing to the wretched drainage,
the open sewer which every French street then
was, and the rank odours which filled the air.
There had been some talk about this plague
before the ball.

Our colony had a good deal of what Captain
Filby called "true British pluck," or what it
fancied was pluck—indifference. The
epidemic would not have the impudence to touch
them; they could face it without that unworthy
crying, or flying, or herding, or, as Captain
Filby profanely said, "jabbering of prayers."
Perhaps at the bottom of this indifference was
the feeling that they could not fly, that they
were driven to the edge of the sea, with their
back to a wall, and must face it. How easy to
cross over into dear happy old England! But,
alas!——Still, it was not so likely to come
there—to the charming Dieppe, always so