beyond the impulses of his
itching palm the sight of the delicate, girlish face of the Rosebud
of Delhi had caused him to dream the strangest dreams. "Why not?" he
murmured as he wandered back to the hotel and privately indulged in a
petit verre before his rendezvous with Miss Genie, the belle of the
West Side. Major Alan Hawke was in "great form" as he piloted the
bright-eyed, willful Chicago girl through the dim religious light of the
Cathedral. His mocking history of the gay life and racy adventures of
Bonnivard, when posing as the rollicking Prior of St. Victor in the wild
days of his youth, greatly amused the nervous American heiress.

"I should say that he was a holy terror," laughed Miss Genie, "and I
don't blame the Bishop of Geneva and the Duke of Savoy for making him
do his six years in that dark old hole at Chillon! He was a gay boy, you
bet, and with his three wives and his lively ways, I reckon the Genevans
were blamed sorry they ever let him out. He seems to have been a free
thinker, a free liver, and a free lover!"

"And yet," mused Alan Hawke, "his writings to-day are the pride of
Genevan scholars; his library was the nucleus of the Geneva University;
his defiant spirit broke the chains of Calvin's narrowness, and his
resistant, spiritual example caught up has made Geneva the home of the
oppressed, the central, radiant point of mental light and liberty
for the world! Geneva since 1536 has harbored the brightest wandering
Spanish, French, English, and Irish youth! Even grim Russia cannot
reclaim from the free city its wayward exiles. France, in her
distress, has found an asylum here for its helpless nobles and expelled
philosophers. I willingly take my hat off to brave little Switzerland,
where Royal Duke, proscribed patriot, mad enthusiast, bold agnostic,
and tired worldling can all find an inviolate asylum under the majestic
shadows of its mountains--by the shores of its dreaming lakes!" Alan
Hawke dropped suddenly from the clouds as the practical Miss Genie led
the way to the breakfast rendezvous, cheerfully demonstrating her own
bold ideas of social freedom by remarking:

"Say! what's the matter with a little day's run up to Chillon? Phenie
is game for anything! You just get that other English Lord and we will
dodge Popper and Mommer."

"I am sorry to say that my friend has left suddenly, bound for London,"
laughed the Major, gazing admiringly at this pretty feminine Bonnivard.

"That's awful bad