He sweated at the thought. He cursed, cursed frantically his folly in omitting to give himself out for worse than he was; in omitting to take to his bed early in the day! Then he might have kept it through the night, through the fight; then he might have avoided risks. Now he felt that every ball discharged at a venture must strike him; that if he showed so much as his face at a window death must find its opportunity. He would not have dared to pass through a street on a windy day now--for if a tile fell it must fall on him. And he must fight! He must fight! His manhood shrivelled within him at the thought. He shuddered. He was still shuddering, when on the shutter which masked the casement came a knock, thrice repeated. A cautious knock of which the mere sound implied an understanding. The Syndic remained motionless, glaring at the window. Everything on a night like this, and to an uneasy conscience, menaced danger. At length it occurred to him that the applicant might be Louis, whom he had sent with the message to the Porte Neuve: and he took the lamp and went to admit him, albeit reluctantly, for what did the booby mean by returning? It was late, and only to open at this hour might, in the light cast by after events, raise suspicions. But it was not Louis. The lamp flickering in the draught of the doorway disclosed a huge dusky form, glimmering metallic here and there, that in a trice pushed him back, passed by him, entered. It was Basterga. The Syndic shut the door, and staggered rather than walked after him to the parlour. There the Syndic set down the lamp, and turned to the scholar, his face a picture of guilty terror. "What is it?" he muttered. "What has happened? Is--the thing put off?" The other's aspect answered his question. A black corselet with shoulder pieces, and a feathered steel cap raised Basterga's huge stature almost to the gigantic. Nor did it need this to render him singular; to draw the eye to him a second time and a third. The man himself in this hour of his success, this moment of conscious daring, of reliance on his star and his strength, towered in the room like a demi-god. "No," he answered, with a ponderous, exultant smile, slow to come, slow to go. "No, Messer Blondel. Far from it. It has not been put off." "Something has been discovered?" "No. We are here. That is all." The Syndic supported himself by a hand pressed hard against the table behind him. "Here?" he gasped. "You are here? You have the town already? It is impossible." "We have three hundred men in the Corraterie," Basterga answered. "We hold the Tertasse Gate, and the Monnaye. The Porte Neuve is cut off, and at our mercy; it will be taken when we give the signal. Beyond it four thousand men are waiting to enter. We hold Geneva in our grip at last--at last!" And in an accent half tragic, half ironic, he declaimed:--