notice of the neighbours, when a
sound--a sound from within, from upstairs--stayed the tumult as by
magic.

Blondel ceased to struggle, and stood aghast. Basterga relaxed his hold
upon his prisoners and listened. Claude leant back against the wall. The
girl alone--she alone moved. Without speaking, without looking, as a
bird flies to its young, she sprang to the stairs and fled up them.

The maniacal laugh, the crazy words--a moment only, they heard them: and
then the door above, which the poor woman, so long bedridden, had
contrived in her frenzy of fear to open, closed on the sounds and
stifled them. But enough had been heard: enough to convince Blondel,
enough to justify Basterga, enough to change the fortunes of more than
one in the room. The scholar's eyes met the Syndic's.

"Are you satisfied?" he asked, in a low voice.

Blondel, breathing hard, nodded.

"You heard?"

He nodded a second time. He looked scared.

"Then you have enough to burn the old witch and the young one with her!"
Basterga replied. He turned his small eyes, sparkling with malignity, on
the young man, who stood against the wall, pale, and but half recovered
from the blow he had sustained. "You thought to thwart me, did you,
Messer Claude? You thought yourself clever enough to play with Caesar
Basterga, did you? To hold at bay--oh, clever fellow--a magistrate and a
scholar! And defy us both! Now I will tell you what will come of it!" He
shook his great finger in front of the young man. "Your pretty bit of
pink and white will burn! Burn, see you! A show for the little boys, a
holiday for the young men and the young women, a treat for the old men,
who will see her white limbs writhe in the smoke! Ha!" as Claude, with a
face of horror, would have waved him away, "that touches you, does it?
You had not thought of that? Nay, you had not thought of other things. I
tell you, before the sun sets this evening, this house shall be
anathema! Before night what we have heard will be known abroad, and
there will be much added to it. There was a child died in the fourth
house from this on Sunday! It will be odd if she did not overlook it.
And the young wife of the Lieutenant at the Porte Tertasse, who has
ailed since her marriage--a pale thing; who knows but he looked this way
once and Mistress Anne thought ill of his defection? Ha! Ha! You would
cross Caesar Basterga, would you? No, Messer Claude," he set his huge
foot on the fallen sword which Claude h