e Blondel and
Basterga and Grio and Louis, and presently all the town of Geneva! All
these gloomy, narrow, righteous men, and shrieking, frightened
women--frightened lest any drop of the pitch fall on them and destroy
them! Love is a marvellous educator. Almost as clearly as we of a later
day, he saw how outbreaks of superstition, such as that which he
dreaded, began, and came to a head, and ended. A chance word at a door,
a spiteful rumour or a sick child, the charge, the torture, the widening
net of accusation, the fire in the market-place. So it had been in
Bamberg and Wurzburg, in Geneva two generations back, in Alsace scarce
as many years back: at Edinburgh in Scotland where thirty persons had
suffered in one day--ten years ago that; in the district of Como, where
a round thousand had suffered!

Nobility had not availed to save some, nor court-favour others; nor
wealth, nor youth, nor beauty. And what had he or she to urge, what had
they to put forward that would in the smallest degree avail them? That
could even for a moment stem or avert the current of popular madness
which power itself had striven in vain to dam. Nothing!

And yet he did not blench, nor would he; being half French and of good
blood, at a time when good French blood ran the more generously for a
half century of war. He would not have blenched, even if he had not,
from the sunlit view of God's earth and heaven which lay before his
eyes, drawn other thoughts than that one of his own littleness and
insignificance. As this view of vale and mountain had once before lifted
his judgment above the miasma of a cruel superstition, so it raised him
now above creeping fears and filled him with confidence in something
more stable than magistrates or mobs. Love, like the sunlight, shone
aslant the dark places of the prospect and filled them with warmth.
Sacrifice for her he loved took on the beauty of the peaks, cold but
lovely; and hope and courage, like the clear blue of the vault above,
looked smiling down on the brief dangers and the brief troubles of man's
making.

The clock of St. Gervais was striking eleven as, still in exalted mood,
he turned his back on the view and entered the house in the Corraterie.
He had entered on his return from his fruitless visit to Blondel, and
had satisfied himself that Anne was safe. Doubtless she was still safe,
for the house was quiet.

In his new mood he was almost inclined to quarrel with this. In the
ardour of hi