And yet Claude doubted. He began to suspect--for love is jealous--that Blondel had behind this a more secret, a more personal, a more selfish aim. Had the young girl, still in her teens, caught the fancy of the man of sixty? There was nothing unnatural in the idea; such things were, even in Geneva; and Louis was a go-between, not above the task. In that case she who had showed a brave front to Basterga all these months, who had not blenched before the daily and hourly persecution to which she had been exposed in her home, was not likely to succumb to the senile advances of a man who might be her grandfather! If he did not hold her secret. But if he did hold it? If he did hold it, and the cruel power it gave? If he held it, he who had only to lift his hand to consign her to duress on a charge so dark and dangerous that innocence itself was no protection against it? So plausible that even her lover had for a short time held it true? What then? Claude, who had by this time reached the Tertasse gate and passed through it from the town side, paused on the ramparts and bared his head. What then? He had his answer. Framed in the immensity of sky and earth that lay before him, he saw his loneliness and hers, his insignificance and hers, his helplessness and hers; he, a foreigner, young, without name or reputation, or aught but a strong right hand; she, almost a child, alone or worse than alone, in this great city--one of the weak things which the world's car daily and hourly crushes into the mud, their very cries unheard and unheeded. Of no more account than the straw which the turbid Rhone, bore one moment on its swirling tide, and the next swallowed from sight beneath its current! They were two--and a mad woman! And against them were Blondel and Basterga and Grio and Louis, and presently all the town of Geneva! All these gloomy, narrow, righteous men, and shrieking, frightened women--frightened lest any drop of the pitch fall on them and destroy them! Love is a marvellous educator. Almost as clearly as we of a later day, he saw how outbreaks of superstition, such as that which he dreaded, began, and came to a head, and ended. A chance word at a door, a spiteful rumour or a sick child, the charge, the torture, the widening net of accusation, the fire in the market-place. So it had been in Bamberg and Wurzburg, in Geneva two generations back, in Alsace scarce as many years back: at Edinburgh in Scotland where thirty persons had suffered in one day--ten years ago that; in the district of Como, where a round thousand had suffered! Nobility had not availed to save some, nor court-favour others; nor wealth, nor youth, nor beauty. And what had he or she to urge, what had they to put forward that would in the smallest degree avail them? That could even for a moment stem or avert the current of popular madness which power itself had striven in vain to dam. Nothing!