“I’ll just try one more place this evening,” he said as soon as he had swallowed some of the hot coffee—“a restaurant in the Rue de la Harpe; the members of the Cordeliers’ Club often go there for supper, and they are usually well informed. I might glean something definite there.”
“It seems very strange that they are so slow in bringing him to trial,” said Marguerite in that dull, toneless voice which had become habitual to her. “When you first brought me the awful news that... I made sure that they would bring him to trial at once, and was in terror lest we arrived here too late to—to see him.”
She checked herself quickly, bravely trying to still the quiver of her voice.
“And of Armand?” she asked.
He shook his head sadly.
“With regard to him I am at a still greater loss,” he said: “I cannot find his name on any of the prison registers, and I know that he is not in the Conciergerie. They have cleared out all the prisoners from there; there is only Percy—”
“Poor Armand!” she sighed; “it must be almost worse for him than for any of us; it was his first act of thoughtless disobedience that brought all this misery upon our heads.”
She spoke sadly but quietly. Sir Andrew noted that there was no bitterness in her tone. But her very quietude was heart-breaking; there was such an infinity of despair in the calm of her eyes.
“Well! though we cannot understand it all, Lady Blakeney,” he said with forced cheerfulness, “we must remember one thing—that whilst there is life there is hope.”
“Hope!” she exclaimed with a world of pathos in her sigh, her large eyes dry and circled, fixed with indescribable sorrow on her friend’s face.