followed him out. The
abruptness of the departure did not surprise him. "Believe me, I feel
for you, Messer Blondel."

The Syndic acknowledged the phrase by a gesture not without pathos, and,
passing out, stumbled blindly down the narrow stairs. Basterga attended
him with respect to the outer door, and there they parted in silence.
The magistrate, his shoulders bowed, walked slowly to the left, where,
turning into the town through the inner gate, the Porte Tertasse, he
disappeared. The big man waited a while, sunning himself on the steps,
his face towards the ramparts.

"He will come back, oh, yes, he will come back," he purred, smiling all
over his large face. "For I, Caesar Basterga, have a brain. And 'tis
better a brain than thews and sinews, gold or lands, seeing that it has
all these at command when I need them. The fish is hooked. It will be
strange if I do not land him before the year is out. But the bribe to
his physician--it was a happy thought: a happy thought of this brain of
Caesar Basterga, graduate of Padua, _viri valde periti, doctissimique_!"

CHAPTER VI.

TO TAKE OR LEAVE.

The house in the Corraterie, near the Porte Tertasse, differed in no
outward respect from its neighbours. The same row of chestnut trees
darkened its lower windows, the same breezy view of the Rhone meadows,
the sloping vineyards and the far-off Jura lightened its upper rooms. A
kindred life, a life apparently as quiet and demure, moved within its
walls. Yet was the house a house apart. Silently and secretly, it had
absorbed and sucked and drawn into itself the hearts and souls and minds
of two men. It held for the one that which the old prize above all
things in the world--life; and for the other, that which the young set
above life--love.

Life? The Syndic did not doubt; the bait had been dangled before his
eyes with too much cunning, too much skill. In a casket, in a room in
that house in the Corraterie, his life lay hidden; his life, and he
could not come at it! His life? Was it a marvel that waking or sleeping
he saw only that house, and that room, and that casket chained to the
wall; that he saw at one time the four steps rising to the door, and the
placid front with its three tiers of windows; at another time, the room
itself with its litter of scripts and dark-bound books, and rich
furnishings, and phials and jars and strangely shaped alembics? Was it a
marvel that in the dreams of the night the sick man toile