wherewith I dupe others? Or, that once I have my foot on firm
ground I will stoop again to the things of matter and sense? No, by
Hercules!" the big man continued, his eye kindling, his form dilating.
"This scheme once successful, this feat that should supply me for life,
once performed, Caesar Basterga of Padua will know how to add, to those
laurels which he has already gained,

The bays of Scala and the wreath of More,
Erasmus' palm and that which Lipsius wore."

And in a kind of frenzy of enthusiasm the scholar fell to pacing the
floor, now mouthing hexameters, now spurning with his foot a pot or an
alembic which had the ill-luck to lie in his path. Grio watched him, and
watching him, grew only more puzzled--and more puzzled. He could have
understood a moral shrinking from the enterprise on which they were both
embarked--the betrayal of the city that gave them shelter. He could have
understood--he had superstition enough--a moral distaste for alchemy and
those practices of the black art which his mind connected with it. But
this superiority of the scholar, this aloofness, not from the treachery,
but from the handicraft, was beyond him. For that reason it imposed on
him the more.

Not the less, however, was he importunate to know wherein Basterga
trusted. To rave of Scholarship and Scaliger was one thing, to bring
Blondel into the plot which was to transfer Geneva to Savoy and strike
the heaviest blow at the Reformed that had been struck in that
generation, was another thing and one remote. The Syndic was a trifle
discontented and inclined to intrigue; that was true, Grio knew it. But
to parley with the Grand Duke's emissaries, and strive to get and give
not, that was one thing; while to betray the town and deliver it tied
and bound into the hands of its arch-enemy, was another and a far more
weighty matter. One, too, to which in Grio's judgment--and in the dark
lanes of life he had seen and weighed many men--the magistrate would
never be brought.

"Shall you need my aid with him?" he asked after a while, seeing the
scholar still wrapt in thought. The question was not lacking in craft.

"Your aid? With whom?"

"With Messer Blondel."

"Pshaw, man," Basterga answered, rousing himself from his reverie. "I
had forgotten him and was thinking of that villain Scioppius and his
tract against Joseph Justus. Do you know," he continued with a snort of
indignation, "that in his _Hyperbolimaeus_, not content with t