prison, and she told them her jailor had been to her very unkind, and that he had taken from her the pearl necklace which was her wedding gift, and if you can believe Arenta, they were all extremely polite to her, and gave her at once the papers which permitted her to leave France.  The next day a little money she got from Minister Morris, but a very hard passage she had home.  And listen now, her jailor was guillotined before she left, and she declares it was the necklace—­very unfortunate beads they were, and Madame Jacobus said when she heard of their fate, ’let them go!  With blood and death they came, it is fit they should go as they came!’ Arenta thinks as soon as Fouquier-Tinville heard of them, he doomed the man, for she saw in his eyes that he meant to have them for himself.  Well, then, she is also sure that they will take Fouquier-Tinville to the guillotine.”

“After all, it was a lie she told, Joris.”

“That is so, but I think her life was worth a few words.  And Thomas Jefferson says she was ten thousand times welcome to the protection his name gave her.  I thank my God I have never had such temptation.  I will say one thing though, Lysbet, that if coming home some night, a thief should say to me ‘your money I must have’ and if in my pocket I had some false money, as well as true money, the false money I would give the thief and think no shame to do it.  Overly righteous we must not be, Lysbet.”

“I am astonished also.  I thought Arenta would cry out and that only.”

“What a man or a woman will do and suffer, and how they will do and suffer, no one knows till comes some great occasion.  When the water is ice, who could believe that it would boil, unless they had seen ice become boiling water?  All the human heart wants, is the chance.”

“As men and women have in Paris to live, I wonder me, that they can wish to live at all!  Welcome to them must be death.”

“So wrong are you, Lysbet.  Trouble and hardship make us love life.  A zest they give to it.  It is when we have too much money, too much good food and wine, too much pleasure of all kinds, that we grow melancholy and sad, and say all is vanity and vexation.  You may see that it is always so, if you look in the Holy Scriptures.  It was not from the Jews in exile and captivity, but from the Jews of Solomon’s glory came the only dissatisfied, hopeless words in the Bible.  Yes, indeed! it is the souls that have too much, who cry out vanity, vanity, all is vanity!  For myself, I like not the petty prudencies of Solomon.  There is better reading in Isaiah, and in the Psalms, and in the blessed Gospels.”

“To-morrow, Joris, I will go and see Arenta.  She is fair, and she knows it; witty, and she knows it; of good courage, and she knows it; the fashion, and she knows it; and when she speaks, she speaks oracles that one must believe, even though one does not understand them.  To Aurelia Van Zandt she said, my heart will ache forever for my beloved Athanase, and Aurelia says, that her old lover Willie Nicholls is at her feet sitting all the day long—­yet for all these things, she is a brave woman and I will go and see her.”