I was rapt in the contemplation of my own ingenuity in having thus brilliantly attained my goal, when a stealthy noise in the next room roused me from my trance and brought up vividly to my mind the awful risks which I was running at this moment.  I turned like an animal at bay to see Estelle’s beautiful face peeping at me through the half-open door.

“Hist!” she whispered.  “Have you got the papers?”

I waved the packet triumphantly.  She, excited and adorable, stepped briskly into the room.

“Let me see,” she murmured excitedly.

But I, emboldened by success, cried gaily: 

“Not till I have received compensation for all that I have done and endured.”

“Compensation?”

“In the shape of a kiss.”

Oh!  I won’t say that she threw herself in my arms then and there.  No, no!  She demurred.  All young girls, it seems, demur under the circumstances; but she was adorable, coy and tender in turns, pouting and coaxing, and playing like a kitten till she had taken the papers from me and, with a woman’s natural curiosity, had turned the English letters over and over, even though she could not read a word of them.

Then, Sir, in the midst of her innocent frolic and at the very moment when I was on the point of snatching the kiss which she had so tantalizingly denied me, we heard the opening and closing of the front door.

Mr. Farewell had come home, and there was no other egress from the study save the sitting-room, which in its turn had no other egress but the door leading into the very passage where even now Mr. Farewell was standing, hanging up his hat and cloak on the rack.

4.

We stood hand in hand—­Estelle and I—­fronting the door through which Mr. Farewell would presently appear.

“To-night we fly together,” I declared.

“Where to?” she whispered.

“Can you go to the woman at your former lodgings?”

“Yes!”

“Then I will take you there to-night.  To-morrow we will be married before the Procureur du Roi; in the evening we leave for England.”

“Yes, yes!” she murmured.

“When he comes in I’ll engage him in conversation,” I continued hurriedly.  “You make a dash for the door and run downstairs as fast as you can.  I’ll follow as quickly as may be and meet you under the porte-cochere.”

She had only just time to nod assent when the door which gave on the sitting-room was pushed open, and Farewell, unconscious at first of our presence, stepped quietly into the room.

“Estelle,” he cried, more puzzled than angry when he suddenly caught sight of us both, “what are you doing here with that lout?”

I was trembling with excitement—­not fear, of course, though Farewell was a powerful-looking man, a head taller than I was.  I stepped boldly forward, covering the adored one with my body.

“The lout,” I said with calm dignity, “has frustrated the machinations of a knave.  To-morrow I go to England in order to place Mademoiselle Estelle Bachelier under the protection of her legal guardians, Messieurs Pike and Sons, solicitors, of London.”