strange things in respect
to the house. But I will tell you more of that when I know more."

He was too clever to state that he held the house in suspicion for
sorcery and kindred things. Charges such as that spread, he knew,
upwards from the lower classes, not downwards to them. The poison,
disseminated as he had known how to disseminate it, by hints and
innuendoes dropped among his officers and ushers, was already in the
air, and would do its work. Fabri, a man of sense, might laugh to-day,
and to-morrow; but the third day, when the report came to him from a
dozen quarters, mainly by women's mouths, he would not laugh. And
presently he would shrug his shoulders and stand aside, and leave the
matter in more earnest hands.

Blondel dropped no more than that hint, therefore, and as he passed
homeward applauded his discretion. He was proud of the turn things had
taken at the Council; elated by the part he had played, and the proof he
had given of his mastery, he felt able to carry anything through. His
mind, leaping over the immediate future, pictured a wider theatre, in
which his powers would have full scope, and a larger stage on which he
might aspire to play the first part. He saw himself not only wealthy,
but ennobled, the fount of honour, the favourite, and, in time, the
master of princes. Such as he was to-day the Medicis had been, and many
another whom the world held noble. He had but to live and to dare; only
to live and to dare! Only in order to do the one he must--it was no
choice of his--do the other!

Before he was five minutes older he was reminded of the necessity. At
the door of his house the pains of the disease from which he
suffered--aggravated, perhaps, by the excitement through which he had
just passed, or by the cold of the weather--seized him with unusual
violence. He leant, pale and almost fainting, against the door-jamb,
unable at the moment to do so much as raise the latch. The golden dreams
in which he had lost himself by the way, the visions of power and fame,
vanished as he had so many times seen the after-glow vanish from the
snow-peaks; leaving only cold images of death and desolation. Presently,
with an effort, he staggered within doors, poured out such medicine as
he had, and, bent double and almost without breath, swallowed it; and
so, by-and-by, a wan and wild-eyed image of himself came out of the fit.

He told himself in after days that it was that decided him; that but for
that shar