ed her
lips.

Now this was all very well while it lasted, for her father, the
choleric old Comte de Trecourt, had died rich, and the young girl's
charities were doubled, and there was nobody to stay her hand or draw
the generous purse-strings; nobody to advise her or to stop her. On
the contrary, there were plenty of people standing around with
outstretched, itching, and sometimes dirty hands, ready to snatch at
the last centime.

Who was there to administer her affairs, who among the generous,
impetuous, ill-balanced friends that surrounded her? Not the
noble-minded geographer, Elisee Reclus; not the fiery citizen-count,
Rochefort; not the handsome, cultivated Gustave Flourens, already
"fey" with the doom to which he had been born; not that kindly
visionary, the Vicomte de Coursay-Delmont, now discarding his ancient
title to be known only among his grateful, penniless patients as
Doctor Delmont; and surely not Professor Tavernier, nor yet that
militant hermit, the young Chevalier de Gray, calling himself plain
Monsieur Bazard, who chose democracy instead of the brilliant career
to which Grammont had destined him, and whose sensitive and perhaps
diseased mind had never recovered from the shock of the murder of his
comrade, Victor Noir.

But the simple life at La Trappe, the negative protest against the
Empire and all existing social conditions, the purity of motive, the
serene and inspired self-abnegation, could not save the colony at La
Trappe nor the young chatelaine from the claws of those who prey upon
the innocence of the generous.

And so came to this ideal community one John Buckhurst, a stranger,
quiet, suave, deadly pale, a finely moulded man, with delicately
fashioned hands and feet, and two eyes so colorless that in some
lights they appeared to be almost sightless.

In a month from that time he was the power that moved that community
even in its most insignificant machinery. With marvellous skill he
constructed out of that simple republic of protestants an absolute
despotism. And he was the despot.

The avowed object of the society was the advancement of universal
brotherhood, of liberty and equality, the annihilation of those
arbitrary barriers called national frontiers--in short, a society for
the encouragement of the millennium, which, however, appeared to be
coy.

And before the eyes of his brother dreamers John Buckhurst quietly
cancelled the entire programme at one stroke, and nobody understo