She paced with him along the old granite balustrade over which the geraniums flung their mantle of green and scarlet.

“Have you decided what you are going to do?” she asked him.

“I have decided that I have no choice.  I, too, must emigrate.  I am lucky to be able to do so, lucky to have found no one amid yesterday’s chaos in Paris to whom I could report myself as I foolishly desired, else I might no longer be armed with these.”  He drew from his pocket the powerful passport of the Commission of Twelve, enjoining upon all Frenchmen to lend him such assistance as he might require, and warning those who might think of hindering him that they did so at their own peril.  He spread it before her.  “With this I conduct you all safely to the frontier.  Over the frontier M. de Kercadiou and Mme. de Plougastel will have to conduct me; and then we shall be quits.”

“Quits?” quoth she.  “But you will be unable to return!”

“You conceive, of course, my eagerness to do so.  My child, in a day or two there will be enquiries.  It will be asked what has become of me.  Things will transpire.  Then the hunt will start.  But by then we shall be well upon our way, well ahead of any possible pursuit.  You don’t imagine that I could ever give the government any satisfactory explanation of my absence — assuming that any government remains to which to explain it?”

“You mean... that you will sacrifice your future, this career upon which you have embarked?” It took her breath away.

“In the pass to which things have come there is no career for me down there — at least no honest one.  And I hope you do not think that I could be dishonest.  It is the day of the Dantons, and the Marats, the day of the rabble.  The reins of government will be tossed to the populace, or else the populace, drunk with the conceit with which the Dantons and the Marats have filled it, will seize the reins by force.  Chaos must follow, and a despotism of brutes and apes, a government of the whole by its lowest parts.  It cannot endure, because unless a nation is ruled by its best elements it must wither and decay.”

“I thought you were a republican,” said she.

“Why, so I am.  I am talking like one.  I desire a society which selects its rulers, from the best elements of every class and denies the right of any class or corporation to usurp the government to itself — whether it be the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat.  For government by any one class is fatal to the welfare of the whole.  Two years ago our ideal seemed to have been realized.  The monopoly of power had been taken from the class that had held it too long and too unjustly by the hollow right of heredity.  It had been distributed as evenly as might be throughout the State, and if men had only paused there, all would have been well.  But our impetus carried us too far, the privileged orders goaded us on by their very opposition, and the result is the horror of which yesterday you saw no more than the beginnings.  No, no,” he ended.  “Careers there may be for venal place-seekers, for opportunists; but none for a man who desires to respect himself.  It is time to go.  I make no sacrifice in going.”