was no less king of men physically. At the American
Consul's dinner an expedition on the Niessen had been arranged. But as
the party was returning at nightfall across the fields, and laughing
over Lassalle's sprightly anecdotes, suddenly a dozen diabolical
gnomes burst upon them with savage roars and incomprehensible
inarticulate jabberings, and began striking at hazard with their
short, solid cudgels, almost ere the startled picnickers could
recognize in these bestial creatures, with their enormously swollen
heads and horrible hanging goitres, the afflicted idiot peasants of
the valley. The gallant Frenchman and the honey-tongued Italian
screamed with the women, and made even less play with umbrellas and
straps; but Lassalle fell like a thunderbolt with his Robespierre
stick upon the whole band of cretins, and reduced them to howls and
bloodstained tears. It was only then that Lassalle was able to extract
from them that the party had trampled over the hay in their fields,
and that they demanded compensation. Being given money, they departed,
growling and waving their cudgels. When the excursionists looked at
one another they found themselves all in rags, and Lassalle's face
disfigured by two heavy blows. Helene ran to him with a cry.

"You are wounded, bruised!"

"No, only one of the towers of the Bastille," he said, ruefully
surveying the stick; "the brutes have dinted it."

"And there are people who call him coward because he won't fight
duels," thought Helene adoringly.

XIII

The drama shifted to Geneva, where heroine preceded hero by a few
hours, charged to be silent till her parents had personally
experienced Lassalle's fascinations. He had scarcely taken possession
of his room in the Pension Bovet when a maidservant brought in a
letter from Helene, and ere he had time to do more than break the
envelope, Helene herself burst in.

"Take me away, take me away," she cried hysterically.

He flew to support her.

"What has happened?"

"I cannot bear it. I cannot fight them. Save me, my king, my master.
Let us fly across the frontier--to Paris." She clung to him wildly.

Sternness gathered on his brow.

"Then you have disobeyed me!" he said. "Why?"

"I have written you," she sobbed.

He laid her gently on the bed, and ran his eye through the long,
hysteric letter.

Unhappy coincidence! At Helene's arrival, her whole family had met her
joyously at the railway station, overbrimming with the happy new