"Basterga? Why----" But on the word Blondel stopped; and over his face came a startling change. The rage died out of it and the flush; and fear, and a cringing embarrassment, took the place of them. In the same instant the change was made, and Claude saw that which caused it. Basterga himself stood in the half-open doorway, looking towards them. For a few seconds no one spoke. The magistrate's tongue clave to the roof of his mouth, as the scholar advanced, cap in hand, and bowed to one and the other. The florid politeness of his bearing thinly veiling the sarcasm of his address when he spoke. "O mire conjunctio!" he said. "Happy is Geneva where age thinks no shame of consorting with youth! And youth, thrice happy, imbibes wisdom at the feet of age! Messer Blondel," he continued, looking to him, and dropping in a degree the irony of his tone, "I have not seen you for so long, I feared that something was amiss, and I come to inquire. It is not so, I hope?" The Syndic, unable to mask his confusion, forced a sickly phrase of denial. He had dreaded nothing so much as to be surprised by Basterga in the young man's company: for his conscience warned him that to find him with Mercier and to read his plan, would be one and the same thing to the scholar's astuteness. And here was the discovery made, and made so abruptly and at so unfortunate a moment that to carry it off was out of his power, though he knew that every halting word and guilty look bore witness against him. "No? that is well," Basterga answered, smiling broadly as he glanced from one face to the other. "That is well!" He had the air of a good-natured pedagogue who espies his boys in a venial offence, and will not notice it save by a sly word. "Very well! And you, my friend," he continued, addressing Claude, "is it not true what I said, Terque Quaterque redit! You fled in haste last night, but we meet again! Your method in affairs is the reverse, I fear, of that which your friend here would advise: namely, that to carry out a plan one should begin slowly, and end quickly; thereby putting on the true helmet of Plato, as it has been called by a learned Englishman of our time." Claude glowered at him, almost as much at a loss as the Syndic, but for another reason. To exchange commonplaces with the man who held the woman he loved by an evil hold, who owned a power so baneful, so foul--to bandy words with such an one was beyond him. He could only glare at him in speechless indignation. "You bear malice, I fear," the big man said. There was no doubt that he was master of the situation. "Do you know that in the words of the same learned person whom I have cited--a marvellous exemplar amid that fog-headed people--vindictive persons live the life of witches, who as they are mischievous, so end they unfortunate." The blood left Claude's face. "What do you mean?" he muttered, finding his voice at last. "Who hates, burns. Who loves, burns also. But that is by the way." "Burns?"