her little missus, galloping out of the close on some bloody errand!"

"You ought to be thankful, Mrs. Blake, to have her out of the way, instead of around our children, poisoning their hinfant minds! Thank God they are playing in the church lane like little Christians, safe from even that lad and lass yonder!"

A yell of fighting from the little Christians mingled with their hoots at choir boys gathering for the ten o'clock service in St. Bat's. When Mrs. Blake and her friend saw this preparation, they withdrew their dissenting heads from the arcades in order not to countenance what might go on below.

Minute followed minute, and the little bell struck the four quarters. Then the great bell boomed out ten;—the bell which had given signal for lighting the funeral piles of many a martyr, on Smithfield, directly opposite the church. Organ music pealed; choir boys appeared from their robing-room beside the entrance, pacing two and two as they chanted. The celebrant stood in his place at the altar, and antiphonal music rolled among the arches; pierced by the dagger voice of a woman in the arcades, who called after the retreating butcher's boy to look sharp, and bring her the joint she ordered.

Eagle sprang up and dragged the arm of the unmoving boy in the north transept. There was a weeping tomb in the chancel which she wished to show him,—lettered with a threat to shed tears for a beautiful memory if passers-by did not contribute their share; a threat the marble duly executed on account of the dampness of the church and the hardness of men's hearts. But it was impossible to disturb a religious service. So she coaxed the boy, dragging behind her, down the ambulatory beside the oasis of chapel, where the singers, sitting side-wise, in rows facing each other, chanted the Venite. A few worshipers from the close, all of them women, pattered in to take part in this daily office. The smithy hammers rang under organ measures, and an odor of cooking sifted down from the arcades.

Outside the church big fat-bellied pigeons were cooing about the tower or strutting and pecking on the ground. To kill one was a grave offense. The worst boy playing in the lane durst not lift a hand against them.

Very different game were Eagle and the other alien whom she led past the red faced English children.

"Good day," she spoke pleasantly, feeling their antagonism. They answered her with a titter.

"Sally Blake is the only one I know," she explained in French, to her companion who moved feebly and stiffly behind her dancing step. "I cannot talk English to them, and besides, their manners are not good, for they are not like our peasants."

Sally Blake and a bare kneed lad began to amble behind the foreigners, he taking his cue smartly and lolling out his tongue. The whole crowd set up a shout, and Eagle looked back. She wheeled and slapped the St. Bat's girl in the face.

That silent being whom she had taken under her care recoiled from the blow which the bare kneed boy instantly gave him, and without defending himself or her, shrank down in an attitude of entreaty. She screamed with pain at this sight, which hurt worse than the hair-pulling of the mob around her. She fought like a panther in front of him.

Two men in the long narrow lane leading from Smithfield, interfered, and scattered her assailants.

You may pass up a step into the graveyard, which is separated by a wall from the lane. And though nobody followed, the two men hurried Eagle and the boy into the graveyard and closed the gate.

It was not a large enclosure, and thread-like paths, grassy and ungraveled, wound among crowded graves. There was a very high outside wall: and the place insured such privacy as could not be had in St. Bat's church. Some crusted stones lay broad as gray doors on ancient graves; but the most stood up in irregular oblongs, white and lichened.

A cat call from the lane was the last shot of the battle. Eagle valiantly sleeked her disarrayed hair, the breast under her bodice still heaving and sobbing. The June sun illuminated a determined child of the gray eyed type between white and brown, flushed with fullness of blood, quivering with her intensity of feeling.

"Who would say this was Mademoiselle de Ferrier!" observed the younger of the two men. Both were past middle age. The one whose queue showed the most gray took Eagle reproachfully by her hands; but the other stood laughing.

"My little daughter!"

"I did strike the English girl—and I would do it again, father!"

"She would do it again, monsieur the marquis," repeated the laugher.

"Were the children rude to you?"

"They mocked him, father." She pulled the boy from behind a grave-stone where he crouched unmoving as a rabbit, and showed him to her guardians. "See how weak he is! Regard him—how he walks in a dream! Look at his swollen wrists—he cannot fight. And if you wish to make these English respect you you have got to fight them!"

"Where is Ernestine? She should not have left you alone."

"Ernestine went to the shops to obey your orders, father."

The boy's dense inertia was undisturbed by what had so agonized the girl. He stood in the English sunshine gazing stupidly at her guardians.

"Who is this boy, Eagle?" exclaimed the younger man.

"He does not talk. He does not tell his name."

The younger man seized the elder's arm and whispered to him.

"No, Philippe, no!" the elder man answered. But they both approached the boy with a deference which surprised Eagle, and examined his scarred eyebrow and his wrists. Suddenly the marquis dropped upon his knees and stripped the stockings down those meager legs. He kissed them, and the swollen ankles, sobbing like a woman. The boy seemed unconscious of this homage. Such exaggeration of her own tenderness made her ask,

"What ails my father, Cousin Philippe?"

Her Cousin Philippe glanced around the high walls and spoke cautiously.

"Who was the English girl at the head of your mob, Eagle?"

"Sally Blake."

"What would Sally Blake do if she saw the little king of France and Navarre ride into the church lane, filling it with his retinue, and heard the royal salute of twenty-one guns fired for him?"

"She would be afraid of him."

"But when he comes afoot, with that idiotic face, giving her such a good chance to bait him—how can she resist baiting him? Sally Blake is human."

"Cousin Philippe, this is not our dauphin? Our dauphin is dead! Both my father and you told me he died in the Temple prison nearly two weeks ago!"

The Marquis de Ferrier replaced the boy's stockings reverently, and rose, backing away from him.

"There is your king, Eagle," the old courtier announced to his child. "Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, survives in this wreck. How he escaped from prison we do not know. Why he is here unrecognized in England, where his claim to the throne was duly acknowledged on the death of his father, we do not know. But we who have often seen the royal child cannot fail to identify him; brutalized as he is by the past horrible year of his life."

The boy stood unwinking before his three expatriated subjects. Two of them noted the traits of his house, even to his ears, which were full at top, and without any indentation at the bottom where they met the sweep of the jaw.

The dauphin of France had been the most tortured victim of his country's Revolution. By a jailer who cut his eyebrow open with a blow, and knocked him down on the slightest pretext, the child had been forced to drown memory in fiery liquor, month after month. During six worse months, which might have been bettered by even such a jailer, hid from the light in an airless dungeon, covered with rags which were never changed, and with filth and vermin which daily accumulated, having his food passed to him through a slit in the door, hearing no human voice, seeing no human face, his joints swelling with poisoned blood, he had died in everything except