Shunning--since that September night of a tragedy that had stricken him for the time being half-demented--personal intercourse with any--even the gentle Vergniaud--whose precepts and practice of liberty seemed so grotesquely irreconcilable, he lost something of his former feeling of a moral participation in the scenes enacting about him. Of the revengeful woman, with whose destinies a joyless fatality had appeared to connect him, he had seen nothing since the hour of his agonising experience at the Salpétrière--had heard only, with a savage exultation, that her latest connection with the moderate party was undermining her popularity with that more formidable class of which the link-women on the prison steps had been prominent representatives. “She will be devoured by her own dogs,” he would think; and “God in heaven!” he would cry in his soul, “to what an association with cutthroats and queans has Providence thought fit to condemn me--me whose heart burns always like a pure steadfast lamp before the shrine of its divinity!” * * * * * * * * One bitter evening Ned found himself abroad in the streets--a mere waif of destiny, hustled and jogged into the kennels by an arrogant wind. The iciness of this dulled all his faculties, blinded him as he struggled aimlessly on. “It must make the stones weep,” he thought, “or why should my eyes fill with water!” The lamps slung across the narrower gullies danced like boats at their moorings. The very shop fronts seemed to flap their sign-boards, like hands, for warmth. He had crossed the river and penetrated the Faubourg St Germain as far as the Rue de Vaurigard. On his right, the sombre towers of the Luxembourg reeled into the night; on his left, a starry quiver of lamps shaped out the portico of the Théâtre-Français. He was numb with cold. The glow and movement about the theatre drew him--as they often did nowadays--to a bid for temporary self-forgetfulness. He ran up the steps, entered a warm and lively vestibule, and took a box ticket for the performance. This, when he came to view it, opened with a one-act sketch--“_Allons, ça va_!”--a very patriotic and warlike little piece. He had seen it before, and it did not greatly interest him. He was, in fact, sitting in the covert of his retreat watching rather the house than the players, when all in a moment his heart bounded, and he shrank back into the shadow of the wall-hangings. Opposite him he had seen a party enter a screened box, a _loge grillée_--nothing very significant in itself. But a minute later the grating had swung open, revealing--Pamela. She did not at first catch sight of him. She sat to the front of the tier--she and the little pink-eyed daughter of Orleans. Her cheeks, her hair, her eyes were all a soft glory under the radiance of the lamps. He thought he had never seen her look so happy and so beautiful. There were figures, the indistinct forms of men, standing behind the ladies; but these he could not identify.