The next morning, when he rose, Glyndon did not see the Italian; she was absent from the house when he left it.  It was necessary that he should once more visit C—­ before his final Departure, not only to arrange for Nicot’s participation in the flight, but lest any suspicion should have arisen to thwart or endanger the plan he had adopted.  C—­, though not one of the immediate coterie of Robespierre, and indeed secretly hostile to him, had possessed the art of keeping well with each faction as it rose to power.  Sprung from the dregs of the populace, he had, nevertheless, the grace and vivacity so often found impartially amongst every class in France.  He had contrived to enrich himself—­none knew how—­in the course of his rapid career.  He became, indeed, ultimately one of the wealthiest proprietors of Paris, and at that time kept a splendid and hospitable mansion.  He was one of those whom, from various reasons, Robespierre deigned to favour; and he had often saved the proscribed and suspected, by procuring them passports under disguised names, and advising their method of escape.  But C—­ was a man who took this trouble only for the rich.  “The incorruptible Maximilien,” who did not want the tyrant’s faculty of penetration, probably saw through all his manoeuvres, and the avarice which he cloaked beneath his charity.  But it was noticeable that Robespierre frequently seemed to wink at—­nay, partially to encourage—­such vice in men whom he meant hereafter to destroy, as would tend to lower them in the public estimation, and to contrast with his own austere and unassailable integrity and purism.  And, doubtless, he often grimly smiled in his sleeve at the sumptuous mansion and the griping covetousness of the worthy Citizen C—.

To this personage, then, Glyndon musingly bent his way.  It was true, as he had darkly said to Viola, that in proportion as he had resisted the spectre, its terrors had lost their influence.  The time had come at last, when, seeing crime and vice in all their hideousness, and in so vast a theatre, he had found that in vice and crime there are deadlier horrors than in the eyes of a phantom-fear.  His native nobleness began to return to him.  As he passed the streets, he revolved in his mind projects of future repentance and reformation.  He even meditated, as a just return for Fillide’s devotion, the sacrifice of all the reasonings of his birth and education.  He would repair whatever errors he had committed against her, by the self-immolation of marriage with one little congenial with himself.  He who had once revolted from marriage with the noble and gentle Viola!—­he had learned in that world of wrong to know that right is right, and that Heaven did not make the one sex to be the victim of the other.  The young visions of the Beautiful and the Good rose once more before him; and along the dark ocean of his mind lay the smile of reawakening virtue, as a path of moonlight.  Never, perhaps, had the condition of his soul been so elevated and unselfish.