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.
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