“Ah, yes,” here interposed the young Vicomte, “I have heard speak of this Scarlet Pimpernel. A little flower—red?—yes! They say in Paris that every time a royalist escapes to England that devil, Foucquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, receives a paper with that little flower dessinated in red upon it. . . . Yes?”
“Yes, that is so,” assented Lord Antony.
“Then he will have received one such paper to-day?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Oh! I wonder what he will say!” said Suzanne, merrily. “I have heard that the picture of that little red flower is the only thing that frightens him.”
“Faith, then,” said Sir Andrew, “he will have many more opportunities of studying the shape of that small scarlet flower.”
“Ah! Monsieur,” sighed the Comtesse, “it all sounds like a romance, and I cannot understand it all.”
“Why should you try, Madame?”
“But, tell me, why should your leader—why should you all—spend your money and risk your lives—for it is your lives you risk, Messieurs, when you set foot in France—and all for us French men and women, who are nothing to you?”
“Sport, Madame la Comtesse, sport,” asserted Lord Antony, with his jovial, loud and pleasant voice; “we are a nation of sportsmen, you know, and just now it is the fashion to pull the hare from between the teeth of the hound.”