on't know!"
she repeated. The shade on her face grew deeper. "I thought I was right
then. Now--I--I am frightened." She looked at him with eyes in which her
doubts were mirrored. She shivered, she who had been so joyous a moment
before, and her hands, which hitherto had lain passive in his, returned
his pressure feverishly. "I fear now!" she exclaimed. "I fear! What is
it? What has happened--in the last minute?"

He would have drawn her to him, seeing that her nerves were shaken; but
the table was between them, and before he could pass round it, a sound
caught his ear, a shadow fell between them, and looking up he discovered
Basterga's face peering through the nearer casement. It was pressed
against the small leaded panes, and possibly it was this which by
flattening the huge features imparted to them a look of malignity. Or
the look--which startled Claude, albeit he was no coward--might have
been only the natural expression of one, who suspected what was afoot
between them and came to mar it. Whatever it meant, the girl's cry of
dismay found an echo on Claude's lips. Involuntarily he dropped her
hands; but--and the action was symbolical of the change in her life--he
stepped at the same moment between her and the door. Whatever she had
done, right or wrong, was his concern now.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE _REMEDIUM_.

We have seen that for Claude, as he hurried from the bridge, the faces
he met in the narrow streets of the old town were altered by the medium
through which he viewed them; and appeared gloomy, sordid and fanatical.
In the eyes of Blondel, who had passed that way before him, the same
faces wore a look of selfishness, stupendously and heartlessly cruel.
And not the faces only; the very houses and ways, the blue sky overhead,
and the snow-peaks--when for an instant he caught sight of them--bore
the same aspect. All wore their every-day air, and mocked the despair in
his heart. All flung in his teeth the fact, the incredible fact, that
whether he died or lived, stayed or went, the world would proceed; that
the eternal hills, ay, and the insensate bricks and mortar, that had
seen his father pass, would see him pass, and would be standing when he
was gone into the darkness.

There are few things that to the mind of man in his despondent moods are
more strange, or more shocking, than the permanence of trifles. The
small things to which his brain and his hand have given shape, which he
can, if he will, crus