Grio and Louis towards the girl. He discerned the sword of Damocles that
they held over her, the fear of a charge of witchcraft, or of some vile
heresy, in which they kept her. But how came Blondel in the plot? What
was his part, what his object? If he had been sincere in that attempt on
Basterga's secrets, which Madame's delirious words had frustrated, was
he sincere now? Was his object now as then--the suppression of the
devilish practices of which he had warned Claude, and in the punishment
of which he had threatened to include the girl with her tempter?
Presumably it was, and he was still trying to reach the goal by other
ways, using Louis as he had used Claude, or tried to use him.

And yet Claude doubted. He began to suspect--for love is jealous--that
Blondel had behind this a more secret, a more personal, a more selfish
aim. Had the young girl, still in her teens, caught the fancy of the man
of sixty? There was nothing unnatural in the idea; such things were,
even in Geneva; and Louis was a go-between, not above the task. In that
case she who had showed a brave front to Basterga all these months, who
had not blenched before the daily and hourly persecution to which she
had been exposed in her home, was not likely to succumb to the senile
advances of a man who might be her grandfather!

If he did not hold her secret. But if he did hold it? If he did hold
it, and the cruel power it gave? If he held it, he who had only to lift
his hand to consign her to duress on a charge so dark and dangerous that
innocence itself was no protection against it? So plausible that even
her lover had for a short time held it true? What then?

Claude, who had by this time reached the Tertasse gate and passed
through it from the town side, paused on the ramparts and bared his
head. What then?

He had his answer. Framed in the immensity of sky and earth that lay
before him, he saw his loneliness and hers, his insignificance and hers,
his helplessness and hers; he, a foreigner, young, without name or
reputation, or aught but a strong right hand; she, almost a child, alone
or worse than alone, in this great city--one of the weak things which
the world's car daily and hourly crushes into the mud, their very cries
unheard and unheeded. Of no more account than the straw which the turbid
Rhone, bore one moment on its swirling tide, and the next swallowed from
sight beneath its current!

They were two--and a mad woman! And against them wer