t how
she stood. That being so----

"A coward!" the Syndic repeated, savagely and coarsely. He had waited in
intolerable suspense for the other's answer. "That is what you are, with
all your boasting!--A coward! Afraid of--why, man, of what are you
afraid? Basterga?"

"It may be," Claude answered sullenly.

"Basterga? Why----" But on the word Blondel stopped; and over his face
came a startling change. The rage died out of it and the flush; and
fear, and a cringing embarrassment, took the place of them. In the same
instant the change was made, and Claude saw that which caused it.
Basterga himself stood in the half-open doorway, looking towards them.

For a few seconds no one spoke. The magistrate's tongue clave to the
roof of his mouth, as the scholar advanced, cap in hand, and bowed to
one and the other. The florid politeness of his bearing thinly veiling
the sarcasm of his address when he spoke.

"O mire conjunctio!" he said. "Happy is Geneva where age thinks no shame
of consorting with youth! And youth, thrice happy, imbibes wisdom at the
feet of age! Messer Blondel," he continued, looking to him, and dropping
in a degree the irony of his tone, "I have not seen you for so long, I
feared that something was amiss, and I come to inquire. It is not so, I
hope?"

The Syndic, unable to mask his confusion, forced a sickly phrase of
denial. He had dreaded nothing so much as to be surprised by Basterga in
the young man's company: for his conscience warned him that to find him
with Mercier and to read his plan, would be one and the same thing to
the scholar's astuteness. And here was the discovery made, and made so
abruptly and at so unfortunate a moment that to carry it off was out of
his power, though he knew that every halting word and guilty look bore
witness against him.

"No? that is well," Basterga answered, smiling broadly as he glanced
from one face to the other. "That is well!" He had the air of a
good-natured pedagogue who espies his boys in a venial offence, and will
not notice it save by a sly word. "Very well! And you, my friend," he
continued, addressing Claude, "is it not true what I said,

Terque Quaterque redit!

You fled in haste last night, but we meet again! Your method in affairs
is the reverse, I fear, of that which your friend here would advise:
namely, that to carry out a plan one should begin slowly, and end
quickly; thereby putting on the true helmet of Plato, as it has been
called by