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Percy, you cannot forgive me, nor can I ever forgive myself, but
if you only knew what I have suffered for the past two days you
would, I think, try and forgive. I am free and yet a prisoner; my
every footstep is dogged. What they ultimately mean to do with me
I do not know. And when I think of Jeanne I long for the power to
end mine own miserable existence. Percy! she is still in the
hands of those fiends.... I saw the prison register; her name
written there has been like a burning brand on my heart ever
since. She was still in prison the day that you left Paris;
to-morrow, to-night mayhap, they will try her, condemn her,
torture her, and I dare not go to see you, for I would only be
bringing spies to your door. But will you come to me, Percy? It
should be safe in the hours of the night, and the concierge is
devoted to me. To-night at ten o'clock she will leave the
porte-cochere unlatched. If you find it so, and if on the ledge of
the window immediately on your left as you enter you find a candle
alight, and beside it a scrap of paper with your initials S. P.
traced on it, then it will be quite safe for you to come up to my
room. It is on the second landing--a door on your right--that too
I will leave on the latch. But in the name of the woman you love
best in all the world come at once to me then, and hear in mind,
Percy, that the woman I love is threatened with immediate death,
and that I am powerless to save her. Indeed, believe me, I would
gladly die even now hut for the thought of Jeanne, whom I should
be leaving in the hands of those fiends. For God's sake, Percy,
remember that Jeanne is all the world to me.
"Poor old Armand," murmured Blakeney with a kindly smile directed
at the absent friend, "he won't trust me even now. He won't trust
his Jeanne in my hands. Well," he added after a while, "after all,
I would not entrust Marguerite to anybody else either."
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