The Long Night

They were about to shut the Porte St. Gervais, the north gate of Geneva. The sergeant of the gate had given his men the word to close; but at the last moment, shading his eyes f...

The affair at the inn which had threatened to turn out so unpleasantly for our hero, should have gone some way towards destroying the illusions with which he had entered Geneva....

The old town of Geneva, pent in the angle between lake and river, and cramped for many generations by the narrow corselet of its walls, was not large; it was still high noon whe...

Had it been Mercier's eye in place of his ear which attended the two men to the upper room, he would have remarked--perhaps with surprise, since he had gained some knowledge of...

As the Syndic crossed the threshold of the scholar's room, he uncovered with an air of condescension that, do what he would, was not free from uneasiness. He had persuaded himse...

The house in the Corraterie, near the Porte Tertasse, differed in no outward respect from its neighbours. The same row of chestnut trees darkened its lower windows, the same bre...

Messer Blondel's sagacity in forbearing completely and for so long a period the neighbourhood of Basterga proved an unpleasant surprise to one man; and that was the man most con...

He hurried along the ramparts in a rage with those whom he had left, in a still greater rage with himself. He had played the Tissot with a vengeance. He had flown at them in wea...

Even then, with the daylight about him, he crept into the house under a weight of awe and dread. He left the door ajar that the daylight might enter with him and dispel the shad...

In his spacious chestnut-panelled parlour, in a high-backed oaken chair that had throned for centuries the Abbots of Bellerive, Messer Blondel sat brooding with his chin upon hi...

Long after Basterga, with an exultant smile and the words "I have limed him!" on his lips, had passed into the Bourg du Four and gone to his lodging, the Syndic sat frowning in...

Blondel could not hide the agitation he felt as he listened to his unexpected visitors, and saw whither their errand tended. Fabri, who was leader of the deputation of three who...

Whether Basterga, seeing that Claude was less pliant than he had looked to find him, shunned occasion of collision with him, or the Paduan being in better spirits was less prone...

In his picture of the life led by the two women on the upper floor of the house in the Corraterie, that picture which by a singular intuition he had conceived on the day of his...

To say that the Syndic, as soon as he had withdrawn, repented of his weakness and wished with all his heart that he had not opened until the _remedium_ was in his hand, is only...

Meanwhile, Claude, robbed of his prey, had gone into the town in great disgust. As he passed from the bridge, and paused before he entered the huddle of narrow streets that clim...

We have seen that for Claude, as he hurried from the bridge, the faces he met in the narrow streets of the old town were altered by the medium through which he viewed them; and...

Claude, at the first sign of peril, had put himself between Anne and the door; and, had not the fear which seized the girl at the sight of Basterga robbed her of the power to th...

The wood-ash on the hearth had sunk lower and grown whiter. The last flame that had licked the black sides of the great pot had died down among the expiring embers. Only under t...

Claude flung the cloak from his head and shoulders, and sat up. It was morning--morning, after that long, dear sitting together--and he stared confusedly about him. He had been...

Blondel's thin lips were warrant--to such of the world as had eyes to see--that in the ordinary things of life he would have been one of the last to put faith in a man of Baster...

The long day during which the lovers had drained a cup at once so sweet and so bitter, and one of the two had felt alike the throb of pain and the thrill of kisses, came to an e...

After the wave, the trough of the wave; after action, passion. Not to sink a little after rising to the pitch of self-sacrifice, not to shed, when the deed is done, some bitter...

Claude did not know all that he had done, or the narrow margin of time by which he had succeeded. But he did know that he had saved the gate; that gate on the outer side of whic...

The fear that Blandano might postpone the night-round, to a time which would involve discovery, haunted Blondel; and late on this eventful evening he despatched Louis, as we hav...

Anne was but one of some thousands of women who passed through the trial of that night; who heard the vague sounds of disquiet that roused them at midnight grow to sharp alarms,...