extent to hold the enormous audiences that always assembled to hear the picturesque, passionate and striking oratory of Sergius Thord. But there were one or two rare occasions when even Sergius Thord’s attractions as a speaker were thrown into the background, by the appearance of that mysterious personality known as Lotys,--concerning whom a thousand extravagant stories were rife, none of which were true. It was rumoured among other things as wild and strange, that she was the illegitimate child of a certain great prince, whose amours were legion--that she had been thrown out into the street to perish, deserted as an infant, and that Sergius Thord had rescued her from that impending fate of starvation and death,--and that it was by way of vengeance for the treatment of her mother by the Exalted Personage involved, that she had thrown in her lot with the Revolutionary party, to aid their propaganda by her intellectual gifts, which were many. She was known to be very poor,--she lived in cheap rooms in a low quarter of the city; she was seldom or never seen in the public thoroughfares,--she appeared to have no women friends, and she certainly mixed in no form of social intercourse or entertainment. Yet her name was on the lips of the million, and her influence was felt far beyond the city’s radius. Even among some of the highest and wealthiest classes of society this peculiar appellation of “Lotys,” carrying no surname with it, and spoken at haphazard had the effect of causing a sudden silence, and the interchange of questioning looks among those who heard it, and who, without knowing who she was, or what her aims in life really were, voted her “dangerous.” Those among the superior classes who had by rare chance seen her, were unanimous in their verdict that she was not beautiful,--“but!”--and the “but” spoke volumes. She was known to possess something much less common, and far more potent than beauty,--and that was a fascinating, compelling spiritual force, which magnetised into strange submission all who came within its influence,--and many there were who admitted, though with bated breath that ‘An’ if she chose’ she could easily become a very great personage indeed.