m, unseen shapes hovered closer and closer--was
it his fancy or did he hear them?

He tried to disbelieve, he strove to withstand his terror; and a moment
his fortitude held. Then, as the Syndic, shaking as with the palsy,
tottered, with a hand on either wall down the stairs, and moaning aloud
in his terror, felt his way across the room below, Claude's courage,
too, gave way; not in face of that he saw, but of that which he fancied.
He turned too, and with a greater show of composure, and still carrying
the light, he stumbled down the stairs and into the room below.

There, for an instant sense and nerve returned, and he stood. He turned
even, and made as if he would re-ascend the staircase. But he had no
sooner thrust his head into it, and paused an instant to listen ere he
ventured, than a faint echo of the same mirthless laughter reached him,
and he turned shuddering, and fled--fled out of the room, out of the
house, out of the light, to the same spot under the trees whence he had
started with so bold a heart a few minutes earlier.

The Syndic was there before him--or no, not the Syndic, but a stricken
man, clinging to a tree; seized now and again with a fresh fit of
trembling. "Take me home," he babbled. "There is no hope! There is no
hope. Take me home!"

His house was not far off, and Claude, when he had a little recovered
himself, assented, gave the tottering man his arm and supported him--he
needed support--until they reached the dwelling in the Bourg du Four.
Still a wreck Blondel was by this time a little more coherent. He
foresaw solitude, and dreaded it; and would have had the other enter and
pass the night with him. But the young man, already ashamed of his
weakness, already doubting and questioning, refused, and would say no
more than that he would return on the morrow. With an aspect apparently
composed, he insisted on taking his leave, turned from the door and
retraced his steps to the Corraterie. But when he came to the house, he
lacked, brave as he was, the heart to enter; and passing it, he spent
the time until daybreak, in walking up and down the rampart within
hearing of the sentries.

His mind grown somewhat calmer, he set himself to recall, precisely and
exactly, the thing that had happened. But recall it as he might, he
could not account for it. The words of blasphemy that had scorched his
ears as the key entered the lock, had been uttered, he was sure, in no
voice known to him; nay more, in