But all this did not concern Molly in the least. Don Juan’s only importance for her was as a new acquaintance for Stuart. She took a jealous interest in all Alistair’s friends, not as individuals, but as influences over him which might or might not tend to detach him from herself. “Why are you going to meet him?” she asked, hardly waiting for the answer to her first question. Alistair gave a half-ashamed smile. “Well, he is going to give me a decoration, I believe--the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.” Molly looked impressed. She was sensitive about Alistair’s social position, which she was conscious of having compromised, and this decoration, coming on the morrow of his bankruptcy, seemed a welcome rehabilitation. “Then he really is a Prince?” she asked, with floating recollections of police-court cases in which adventurers had obtained money by pretending to titles not really theirs. Stuart laughed good-naturedly. “Yes, he’s a Prince right enough; at least, he’s as good as the Comte de Rouen.” Molly had heard of the Comte de Rouen, whose party had just given proof of its vitality in a neighbouring country in one of the most extraordinary episodes recorded in history. A conflict, extending over years, and threatening at one time to assume the character of a civil war, had taken place between the heads of the army, on the one hand, and the civil Government on the other, over the body of an obscure Jewish officer. If the guilt or innocence of the victim of this famous persecution had not yet been placed beyond the reach of doubt, at least it was made clear that his enemies had steeped themselves in perjury, forgery, and every kind of subornation and conspiracy. It became equally evident that the motive of their action was rather religious than political; a chasm was revealed running through the nation, and sharply dividing the clerical persecutors from the anti-clerical defenders of the accused man. The army chiefs appeared as the tools of the priesthood, which was seen in full cry on the trail of a Semitic victim. The contagion spread to other countries, and prelates of the Roman Church in England proclaimed their sympathy with the crusade. A shock ran through Europe and America. It was as if the mask of saintly meekness under persecution worn so closely by the Roman Church for a century had been suddenly lifted for a moment, and modern men had obtained a glimpse of the Fury’s visage underneath, with its writhing snakes and its teeth gnashing for blood, the visage which they had almost come to think of as a fable of Protestant historians. The name of the Comte de Rouen silenced Molly, and Alistair was allowed to depart without further objection.