But he had been unable hitherto to be an active member of the League.

The chief was loath to allow him to run foolhardy risks.

The St.Justs--both Marguerite and Armand--were still very well-known in Paris.

Marguerite was not a woman easily forgotten, and her marriage with an English "aristo" did not please those republican circles who had looked upon her as their queen.
Armand's secession from his party into the ranks of the emigres had singled him out for special reprisals, if and whenever he could be got hold of, and both brother and sister had an unusually bitter enemy in their cousin Antoine St.Just--once an aspirant to Marguerite's hand, and now a servile adherent and imitator of Robespierre, whose ferocious cruelty he tried to emulate with a view to ingratiating himself with the most powerful man of the day.
Nothing would have pleased Antoine St.Just more than the opportunity of showing his zeal and his patriotism by denouncing his own kith and kin to the Tribunal of the Terror, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, whose own slender fingers were held on the pulse of that reckless revolution, had no wish to sacrifice Armand's life deliberately, or even to expose it to unnecessary dangers.
Thus it was that more than a year had gone by before Armand St.Just--an enthusiastic member of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel--was able to do aught for its service.

He had chafed under the enforced restraint placed upon him by the prudence of his chief, when, indeed, he was longing to risk his life with the comrades whom he loved and beside the leader whom he revered.
At last, in the beginning of '94 he persuaded Blakeney to allow him to join the next expedition to France.