So when the end came at last, and the inevitable verdict was pronounced,
Mordaunt shut his note-book with a feeling that there was no more to be
recorded.

As a matter of fact the sentence was not pronounced at the time, and only
transpired two days later, when it was officially made public--expulsion
from the army and incarceration in a French fortress for ten years.

"That, of course, will be commuted," said one who knew the probabilities
of the case to Mordaunt when the sentence was made known. "They will
release him _au secret_ in a few years and banish him from the country on
peril of arrest. They are bound to make an example of him, but they won't
keep it up. The verdict was not unanimous. And, above all, they won't
make a martyr of him now. The other _affaire_ is too recent."

Mordaunt agreed as to the likelihood of this, but he did not find it
particularly consolatory. He had seen the prisoner's face as he was
guarded through the surging, hostile crowd; and he knew that for Bertrand
de Montville the heavens had fallen.

An innocent man had been found guilty, and that was the end. He was
beyond the reach of any lenient influence now that justice had failed
him. They had pushed him over the edge of the precipice--this man who had
dared to climb so high; and in the hissings and groanings of the crowd he
heard the death-knell of his honour.

In silence he went down into the abyss. In silence he passed out of
Trevor Mordaunt's life. Only as he went, for one strange second, as
though drawn by some magnetic force, his eyes, dark and still, met those