Feeling at first something like a venturesome infant that had strayed beyond bounds only to be caught back and kissed, Ned mounted to his room to await events. They came thick and swift enough to half induce him to a re-descent upon the scene of action. That temptation he overcame; but all day long, and far into the evening, he wandered, restless and apprehensive, in the Rue St Antoine, watching its turbulent course at the flood, feeling a sympathetic attraction to the electricity of its moods, conscious of the shock of something enacting, or threatening to enact, about that congregated spot where the tumult was heaviest. Still with the passing of day came no abatement of the popular fury, but rather an accumulating of menace; and thereupon (M. le Baron Besenval, Commandant of Paris, having arrived at his decision) down swooped upon the scene a little company of thirty bronzed and brazen French Guards, in their royal chevrons and military coxcombs; which company, clearing intestinal congestion by measures laxative, readjusted the order of affairs, and persuaded exhausted patriots to their burrows. To his bed also went Ned reassured, and slept profoundly and confidently as a rescued castaway. But, waking on the morrow, lo! there was renewal of the uproar shaking his windows, but now as if it would splinter the very glass in its frames. The cause, when he came to examine, was not far to seek. St Antoine, a very confraternity of weasels, baulked but not baffled, was returned to the attack; and at this last it was evident that the paper-maker’s premises were damned. Indeed, the complaint of democracy had suffered a violent relapse during the night; and now, in the new dawn, it blazed and crackled like a furnace. The streets, the roofs, the windows were massed with writhing shapes; the whole quarter jangled in a thunder of voices; a pelt of indifferent missiles, deadly only in the context, rained without ceasing upon the accursed walls. Ned paused a moment, swirled like a straw in the current of rushing humanity, to take stock of possibilities. “If it is so they resent a hasty word,” thought he, “God save Paris in the hour of reprisal!” He felt a little sick at heart. He would look no more. “I will spend an idle day in the fields of Passy,” he assured himself, “and forget it all, and return in the evening to find the storm blown over.” He went out by way of the Place St Paul, walking along the line of quays, and watching, something with the tender feeling of a convalescent, the golden frost of sunlight that gemmed the waters of the Seine. It was a fair, sweet morning, too innocent, it seemed, to take account of human passions; and by-and-by its influence so far wrought upon him as that he was able to commit himself to it with some confidence of enjoyment. All about him, moreover, life seemed pleasurably normal--not significant of fear and apprehension, as his soul had dreaded to find it.