The snow was falling in thin close flakes, and a biting north-easterly wind was blowing those flakes into his face and down his collar.

He wrapped his cloak tightly around him.

It was a good step yet to Blakeney's lodgings, where he knew that he was expected.
He struck quickly into the Rue St.Honore, avoiding the great open places where the grim horrors of this magnificent city in revolt against civilisation were displayed in all their grim nakedness--on the Place de la Revolution the guillotine, on the Carrousel the open-air camps of workers under the lash of slave-drivers more cruel than the uncivilised brutes of the Far West.
And Armand had to think of Jeanne in the midst of all these horrors.

She was still a petted actress to-day, but who could tell if on the morrow the terrible law of the "suspect" would not reach her in order to drag her before a tribunal that knew no mercy, and whose sole justice was a condemnation?
The young man hurried on; he was anxious to be among his own comrades, to hear his chief's pleasant voice, to feel assured that by all the sacred laws of friendship Jeanne henceforth would become the special care of the Scarlet Pimpernel and his league.
Blakeney lodged in a small house situated on the Quai de l'Ecole, at the back of St.Germain l'Auxerrois, from whence he had a clear and uninterrupted view across the river, as far as the irregular block of buildings of the Chatelet prison and the house of Justice.
The same tower-clock that two centuries ago had tolled the signal for the massacre of the Huguenots was even now striking nine.

Armand slipped through the half-open porte cochere, crossed the narrow dark courtyard, and ran up two flights of winding stone stairs.