It was indeed very simple! Nor did the child recoil any longer from the ugly task which milor, with suave speech and tender voice, was so ardently seeking to impose on her.
A few more words of love, which cost him nothing, a few kisses which cost him still less, since the wench loved him, and since she was young and pretty, and Yvonne was as wax in the hands of the traitor.
II
Silence reigned in the low-raftered room on the ground floor of the house in the Rue Dauphine.
Citizen Robespierre, chairman of the Cordeliers Club, the most bloodthirsty, most Evolutionary club of France, had just re-entered the room.
He walked up to the centre table, and through the close atmosphere, thick with tobacco smoke, he looked round on his assembled friends.
"We have got him," he said at last curtly.
"Got him! Whom?" came in hoarse cries from every corner of the room.
"That Englishman," replied the demagogue, "the Scarlet Pimpernel!"
A prolonged shout rose in response—a shout not unlike that of a caged herd of hungry wild beasts to whom a succulent morsel of flesh has unexpectedly been thrown.