head to their movement and make it irresistible, as I believe it will be
beneficent. I set them moving on the lines of the law of things. I am
no empty theorizer, no phantasmal speculator; I am the man of science in
politics. When my system is grasped by the people, there is but a step
to the realization of it. One step. It will be taken in my time, or
acknowledged later. I stand for index to the people of the path they
should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooner or later:
not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh! That is a middle-
class invention to effect a compromise. With the people the matter rests
with their intelligence! meanwhile my star is bright and shines
reflected.'

'I notice,' she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a splendid
lover could crave for, 'that you never look down, you never look on the
ground, but always either up or straight before you.'

'People have remarked it,' said he, smiling. 'Here we are at this
funereal tree again. All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct
us perpetually to this tree. It 's the only dead one here.'

He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches
decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the
small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.
It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.

'Not a single bare spot! but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!' said
Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen. 'This is a tree for a
melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight, after
a scene with his mistress, or tales of her! By the way and by the way,
my fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of garb for