By-and-by, sick at last of inaction, the poor fellow took to the streets, restlessly traversing all quarters of the city--its bye-lanes, its loaded thoroughfares--both by day and lamp-light. Once he made his way to the now ancient ruins of the Bastille, and dully leaving them after a dull inspection--or rather retrospection--looked half curiously up at his old lodgings, yet had not the spirit to visit them and Madame Gamelle. Once a languid thrill penetrated his torpor upon his chancing upon view of an old acquaintance, the Chevalier d’Eon, so queerly associated with a certain episode in his vanished life. He passed the strange creature in the Thuilleries gardens, whither he had come years ago to see a balloon ascend. She stared him full in the face, but without recognition, as she went by. Her eyes bagged in their sockets; she looked old and shabby--an improvident actress retired upon scant savings. Already her gaze had grown unspeculative; the first menace of senility suggested itself in the drooping of her fat old jaw. She had come over from England, Ned learned, a year ago, to petition the National Assembly--in the days before its dissolution--for leave to resume her helmet and her sabre and to serve in the army. Her request had received the double honour of applause and of relegation to the official minutes--where it slept forgotten. The poor chevalier must consign herself gracefully to oblivion--which no actor or actress ever did. She lived on at Paris a few months longer--a decaying old body with a grievance; then returned for the last time to England, where, dying by-and-by in poverty, and being handed over to the final merciless inquisition of the mortuary, she was adjudged--a male impostor, and so committed to a dishonoured grave. Upon Egalité (but recently so designated) Ned happened from time to time, yet only to understand that this would-be popular constituent was resolved upon “cutting” him, a titled aristocrat, from popular motives. Therefore, despite the gnawing of the fox of anxiety at his ribs, the young Englishman, in his pride, would make no appeal to the man who alone could ease his torment; but he endeavoured to ascertain, through indirect report, what were the chances of an early return to Paris on the part of certain notable emigrants; and in the meantime he must settle himself down, with what remnants of philosophy he could command, to a life of miserable inaction and irresolution. Then, once upon a day, behold! into his field of vision, the spectrum of a ghost more remotely haunting than any familiar to his recenter experience, flashed Théroigne, “Our Lady of Darkness,” the realised presentment of a destiny long foreshadowed. And henceforth it was as if he had been hurled into one of those red arteries of fatality (of which the just-erected guillotine was as the throbbing heart) that laced the city in all directions.