" she asked him.

"I have decided that I have no choice. I, too, must emigrate. I am lucky
to be able to do so, lucky to have found no one amid yesterday's chaos
in Paris to whom I could report myself as I foolishly desired, else
I might no longer be armed with these." He drew from his pocket the
powerful passport of the Commission of Twelve, enjoining upon all
Frenchmen to lend him such assistance as he might require, and warning
those who might think of hindering him that they did so at their own
peril. He spread it before her. "With this I conduct you all safely to
the frontier. Over the frontier M. de Kercadiou and Mme. de Plougastel
will have to conduct me; and then we shall be quits."

"Quits?" quoth she. "But you will be unable to return!"

"You conceive, of course, my eagerness to do so. My child, in a day or
two there will be enquiries. It will be asked what has become of me.
Things will transpire. Then the hunt will start. But by then we shall be
well upon our way, well ahead of any possible pursuit. You don't imagine
that I could ever give the government any satisfactory explanation of my
absence--assuming that any government remains to which to explain it?"

"You mean... that you will sacrifice your future, this career upon which
you have embarked?" It took her breath away.

"In the pass to which things have come there is no career for me down
there--at least no honest one. And I hope you do not think that I could
be dishonest. It is the day of the Dantons, and the Marats, the day of
the rabble. The reins of government will be tossed to the populace, or
else the populace, drunk with the conceit with which the Dantons and the
Marats have filled it, will seize the reins by force. Chaos must follow,
and a despotism of brutes and apes, a government of the whole by its
lowest parts. It cannot endure, because unless a nation is ruled by its
best elements it must wither and decay."

"I thought you were a republican," said she.

"Why, so I am. I am talking like one. I desire a society which selects
its rulers from the best elements of every class and denies the right of
any class or corporation to usurp the government to itself--whether it
be the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For
government by any one class is fatal to the welfare of the whole. Two
years ago our ideal seemed to have been realized. The monopoly of power
had been taken from the class that had held it too long and too u