ve?" Blondel muttered, his eyes dilated.

"A good price--for the advice! A good price to tell you, you had it."

The magistrate's face swelled till it was almost purple, his hands
gripped the front of his coat, and pressed hard against his breast.
"But--the pains?" he muttered. "Did you--but no," with a frightful
grimace, "you lie! you lie!"

"Did I bribe him--to give you those too?" the other answered, with a
ruthless laugh. "You have alighted on it, most grave and reverend sage.
You have alighted on the exact fact, so clever are you! That was
precisely what I did some months back, after I heard that you, being
fearful as rich men are, had been to him for some fancied ill. You had
two medicines? You remember? The one gave, the other soothed your
trouble. And now that you understand, now that your mind is free from
care, and you can sleep without fear of the scholar's ill--will you not
thank me for your cure, Messer Blondel?"

"Thank you?" the magistrate panted. "Thank you?" He stepped back two
paces, groping with his hands, as if he sought to support himself by the
table from which he had advanced.

"Ay, thank me!"

"No, but I will pay you!" and with the word Blondel snatched from the
table a pistol which he had laid within his reach an hour earlier.
Before the giant, confident in his size, discovered his danger, the
muzzle was at his breast. It was too late to move then--three paces
divided the men; but, in his haste to raise the pistol, Blondel had not
shaken from it the handkerchief under which he had hidden it, and the
lock fell on a morsel of the stuff. The next moment Basterga's huge hand
struck aside the useless weapon, and flung Blondel gasping against the
wall.

"Fool!" the scholar cried, towering above the baffled, shrinking man
whose attempt had placed him at his mercy. "Think you that Caesar
Basterga was born to perish by your hand? That the gods made me what I
am, I who carry to-night the fortunes of a nation and the fate of a
king, that I might fall by so pitiful a creature as you! Ay, 'tis the
alarm-bell, you are right. And by-and-by your friends will be here. It
is a wonder," he continued, with a cruel look, "that they are not here
already; but perhaps they have enough to fill their hands! And come or
stay--if they be like you, poor fool, weak in body as in wit--I care
not! I, Caesar Basterga, this night lord of Geneva, and in the time to
come, and thanks to you----"

"Curse you!" Blondel gasp