o long on what she was who
stood beside him; nor peer too closely through the murky veil that hid
her being. To do so might be to risk his soul, to become a partner in
her guilt. He might conjecture what dark thoughts and dreadful aptitudes
lurked behind the girl's gentle mask, he might strive to learn by what
black arts she had been seduced, what power over visible things had been
the price of her apostasy, what Sabbath-mark, seal and pledge of that
apostasy she bore--but at what peril! At what risk of soul and body! His
brain reeled, his blood raced at the thought.

Such things had lately been, he knew. Had there not been a dreadful
outbreak in Alsace--Alsace, the neighbour almost of Geneva--within the
last few years. In Thann and Turckheim, places within a couple of days'
journey of Geneva, scores had suffered for such practices; and some of
these not old and ugly, but young and handsome, girls and pages of the
Court and young wives! Had not the most unlikely persons confessed to
practices the most dreadful? The most innocent in appearance to things
unspeakable!

But--with a sudden revulsion of feeling--that was in Alsace, he told
himself. That was in Alsace! Such things did not happen here at men's
elbows! He must have been mad to think it or dream it. And, lifting his
head, he looked about him. The sun had risen higher, the rich vale of
the Rhone, extended at his feet, lay bathed in air and light and
brightness. The burnished hills, the brown, tilled slopes, the gleaming
river, the fairness of that rare landscape clad in morning freshness,
gave the lie to the suspicions he had been indulging, gave the lie,
there and then, to possibilities he dared not have denied in school or
pulpit. Nature spoke to his heart, and with smiling face denied the
unnatural. In Bamberg and Wurzburg and Alsace, but not here! In
Magdeburg, but not here! In Edinburgh, but not here! The world of beauty
and light and growth on which he looked would have none of the dark
devil's world of which he had been dreaming: the dark devil's world
which the sophists and churchmen and the weak-witted of twoscore
generations had built up!

He turned and looked at her, the scales fallen from his eyes. Though she
was still pale, she had recovered her composure and she met his gaze
without blenching. But now, behind the passive defiance, grave rather
than sullen, which she presented to his attack, the weakness, the
helplessness, the heart pain of the wom