evers."

Philippe d'Orvale tossed his silvery hair from his eyes,--eyes of such
sunny lustre still.

"Ay! And those who held that sublime code of yours, that cleaving to
truth for truth's sake, where are they? How have they fared in every
climate and in every age? Stoned, crucified, burned, fettered, broken on
the vast black granite mass of the blind multitude's brutality, of the
priesthood's curse and craft!"

"True! Yet if through us, ever so slightly, the bondage of the creeds'
traditions be loosened from the lives they stifle, and those
multitudes--so weary, so feverish, so much more to be pitied than
condemned--become less blind, less brute, the sacrifice is not in vain."

"In your sense, no. But the world reels back again into darkness as soon
as a hand has lifted it for a while into light. Men hold themselves
purified, civilised; a year of war,--and lust and bloodthirst rage
untamed in all their barbarism; a taste of slaughter,--and they are
wolves again! There was truth in the old feudal saying, 'Oignez vilain,
il vous poindra; poignez vilain, il vous oindra.' Beat the multitudes
you talk of with a despot's sword, and they will lick your feet; touch
them with a Christ-like pity, and they will nail you to the cross."

There was terrible truth in the words: this man of princely blood, who
disdained all sceptres and wanted nothing of the world, could look
through and through it with his bold sunlit eyes, and see its
rottenness to the core.

Chandos sighed as he heard.

"You are right,--only too right. Yet even while they crouch to the
tyrant's sabre, how bitterly they need release! even while they crucify
their teachers and their saviours, how little they know what they do!
They may forsake themselves; but they should not be forsaken."

Philippe d'Orvale looked on him with a light soft as woman's tears in
his eyes, and dashed his hand down on the alabaster.

"Chandos, you live twenty centuries too late. You would have been
crowned in Athens, and throned in Asia. But here, as a saving grace,
they will call you--'mad!'"

"Well, if they do? The title has its honours. It was hooted against
Solon and Socrates."

* * *

"I would do all in the world to please _you_, monseigneur," he answered,
sadly; "but I cannot change my nature. The little aziola loves the
shade, and shrinks from noise and glare and all the ways of men; I am
like it. You cannot make the aziola a bird for sunlight; you c