judgments at Paris!
It was none other but the Angel of God held the sword at Tours! It is
none other holds the sword here! Are you for him or against him? Are
you for him, or for the woman with the mark of the Beast? Are you for
God or against God? For the hour draws near! The time is at hand! You
must choose! You must choose!" And, striking the table with his hand,
he leaned forward, and with glittering eyes fixed each of them in turn,
as he cried, "You must choose! You must choose!" He came to the
Archdeacon last.

The Bishop's Vicar fidgeted in his chair, his face a shade more shallow,
his cheeks hanging a trifle more loosely, than ordinary.

"If my brother were here!" he muttered. "If M. de Montsoreau had
arrived!"

But Father Pezelay knew whose will would prevail if Montsoreau met
Tavannes at his leisure. To force Montsoreau's hand, therefore, to
surround him on his first entrance with a howling mob already committed
to violence, to set him at their head and pledge him before he knew with
whom he had to do--this had been, this still was, the priest's design.

But how was he to pursue it while those gibbets stood? While their
shadows lay even on the chapter table, and darkened the faces of his most
forward associates? That for a moment staggered the priest; and had not
private hatred, ever renewed by the touch of the scar on his brow, fed
the fire of bigotry he had yielded, as the rabble of Angers were
yielding, reluctant and scowling, to the hand which held the city in its
grip. But to have come so far on the wings of hate, and to do nothing!
To have come avowedly to preach a crusade, and to sneak away cowed! To
have dragged the Bishop's Vicar hither, and fawned and cajoled and
threatened by turns--and for nothing! These things were passing
bitter--passing bitter, when the morsel of vengeance he had foreseen
smacked so sweet on the tongue.

For it was no common vengeance, no layman's vengeance, coarse and clumsy,
which the priest had imagined in the dark hours of the night, when his
feverish brain kept him wakeful. To see Count Hannibal roll in the dust
had gone but a little way towards satisfying him. No! But to drag from
his arms the woman for whom he had sinned, to subject her to shame and
torture in the depths of some convent, and finally to burn her as a
witch--it was that which had seemed to the priest in the night hours a
vengeance sweet in the mouth.

But the thing seemed unatta