It irritated him to reflect that he had been obliged to send his man to beg the authorities for protection. To be sure, from fixed habit of assertive, self-important procedure, he had used the word demand; but he knew--and the knowledge redoubled his vexation--that it was a demand he could not enforce. An hour had come to him when the whole of his vast fortune was not able to purchase the one thing that he wanted--bodily safety. He was sensible, too, of a dread, an invincible foreboding of calamity. And while his vanity sustained a hope that the authorities must send word of assurance, his newly illumined reason said the message more likely would show him how a beggar might be answered. The sun neared its setting. All the afternoon its light had played through the glazed dome down on the tessellated pavement; now those cheerful beams had stolen away. Everything in the great chamber upon which his eye fell seemed to mock his wretchedness. With hideous leers the vacant orbs of the Atlantes followed him, and he ended by bowing his head to shut out the sight. Twice he walked the length of the room, then stopped at a window, drew the curtain, and peered out, first upon the gold-tipped foliage of the Public Gardens, then upon the reach of broad Corso northward as far as the Venetian Gate. The sidewalks were alive with moving throngs. They had the aspect of people of the class he had seen walking there on other evenings--a stratum of the bourgeois who had an hour to spare before dinner, returning from their promenade on the Bastions. He remembered that he and Hera had watched them together more than once after a drive. At close range anxiety might have been read in the faces of some and heard in the voices of others; but from where he looked there was naught to suggest that in another part of the town riot and bloodshed had held the stage since sunrise. It was a peaceful enough concourse of citizens; and yet, the scene filled Tarsis with a shuddering dismay. That terror which makes of the stoutest heart a trembling craven was upon him--the terror of the mob. He was about to turn from the window, impatient that Signor Ulrich did not come back--although the man had not had time, without the loss of a minute, to reach the Questura, submit the “demand,” and retrace his steps--when he noted that the faces of the people were turning all in one direction; their gaze was setting upon some one who approached from a point toward Cathedral Square that was beyond his range of vision. Waiting to see who or what it might be that attracted so much attention, he stood there, the curtains scarcely parted, dimly conscious of the rose flush in the sky beyond the trees.