But the gentle, even voice went on, triumphing--the periods so familiar to the lecturer ringing out more clearly than ever. "Wars shall cease only when Wisdom, which is God, shall prevail. Philosophy is at one with Religion. The Thousand Years shall come a thousand times over and on the earth shall reign----" The key gritted in the lock. The Abbé John disappeared behind the heavy curtain which hid the door of the robing-room. The next moment he found himself in the presence of a man, lying rigidly on the Professor's table, all among the books and papers, and of the fairest young girl the Abbé John had ever seen, gently closing eyes which would never more look out upon the world. Within, the Professor's voice droned on, discoursing of peace, righteousness, and eternal law. The great Day of the Barricades rattled and thundered without. Acrid blasts of sulphurous reek drove into the quiet room, and the Abbé John, speechless with amazement, looked into the wet eyes of this wonderful vision--the purest, the loveliest, the most forlorn maid in France. CHAPTER II. CLAIRE AGNEW A long moment they stood gazing at each other, the girl and the Abbé John. They might have been sister and brother. There was the same dark clustering hair, close-gripped in love-locks to the head. The same large, dark, wide-pupilled eyes looked each into each as they stood and gazed across the dead man. For a moment nothing was said, but the Abbé John recovered himself first. "He knows you are here?" he questioned, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "Who?" The girl flung the question back. "Our Professor of Eloquence, the Doctor Anatole Long?" "Aye, surely," said the girl; "he it was brought us hither." He pointed to the dead man. "Your father?" The girl put her hand to her breast and sighed a strange piteous affirmative, yet with a certain reserve in it also. "What was he, and how came you here?" She looked at him. He wore the semi-churchly dress of a scholar of the University. But youth and truth vouched for him, shining from his eyes. So, at least, she thought. Besides, the girl was in a great perplexity. "I am Claire," she said, "the daughter of him who was Francis Agnew, secret agent from the King of Scots to his brother of Navarre!" "A heretic, then!" He fell back a step. "An agent of the Bearnais!" The girl said nothing. She had not even heard him. She was bending over her father and sobbing quietly. "A Huguenot," muttered the young Leaguer, "an agent of the Accursed!" He kept on watching her. There was a soft delicate turn of the chin, childish, almost babyish, which made the heart within him like water. "Chut!" he said, "what I have now to do is to get rid of that ramping steer of a Launay out there. He and his blanket-vending father must not hear of this!" He went out quietly, sinking noiselessly to the ground behind the arras of the door, and emerging again, as into another world, amid the hum and mutter of professorial argument.