Mordaunt agreed as to the likelihood of this, but he did not find it particularly consolatory.  He had seen the prisoner’s face as he was guarded through the surging, hostile crowd; and he knew that for Bertrand de Montville the heavens had fallen.

An innocent man had been found guilty, and that was the end.  He was beyond the reach of any lenient influence now that justice had failed him.  They had pushed him over the edge of the precipice—­this man who had dared to climb so high; and in the hissings and groanings of the crowd he heard the death-knell of his honour.

In silence he went down into the abyss.  In silence he passed out of Trevor Mordaunt’s life.  Only as he went, for one strange second, as though drawn by some magnetic force, his eyes, dark and still, met those of the Englishman, with his level, unfaltering scrutiny.  No word or outward sign passed between them.  They were utter strangers; it was unlikely that they would ever meet again.  Only for that one second something that was in the nature of a message went from one man’s soul to the other’s.  For that instant they were in communion, subtle but curiously distinct.

And Bertrand de Montville went to his martyrdom with the knowledge that one man—­an Englishman—­believed in him, while Trevor Mordaunt was aware that he knew it, and was glad.

For he had studied human nature long enough to realize that even a stranger’s faith may make a supreme difference in the hour of a man’s most pressing need.

CHAPTER II

THE CONQUEST

It was a sunny morning in the end of June, and Chris was doing her hair in curls, for she was expecting a visitor.  It took a very long time to do, for there was so much of it; and she looked very worried over the process.  She would have liked to have borrowed Aunt Philippa’s maid, but this was a prohibited luxury except on very exceptional occasions.  And Hilda—­dear, gentle Cousin Hilda—­was away in Devon with her fiance’s people.  So Chris had to wrestle with her difficulties in solitude.

It was the middle of her first season, and, with a few reservations, she was enjoying it immensely.  The reservations were all directly or indirectly connected with Aunt Philippa, for whom Chris’s feeling was that of an adventurous schoolboy for a somewhat severe headmaster.  She was not exactly afraid of her, but she was instinctively wary in her presence.  She knew quite well that Aunt Philippa had given her this season as her one and only chance in life, and had done it, moreover, more than half against her will, impelled thereto by the urgent representations of her son and daughter, who looked upon their merry little cousin as their joint protegee.  She ought, doubtless, to have come out the previous year, but her aunt’s ill-health had precluded this, and the whole summer had been spent in the country.