religious light of the Cathedral. His mocking history of the gay
life and racy adventures of Bonnivard, when posing as the rollicking
Prior of St. Victor in the wild days of his youth, greatly amused
the nervous American heiress.

"I should say that he was a holy terror," laughed Miss Genie, "and I
don't blame the Bishop of Geneva and the Duke of Savoy for making
him do his six years in that dark old hole at Chillon! He was
a gay boy, you bet, and with his three wives and his lively ways,
I reckon the Genevans were blamed sorry they ever let him out. He
seems to have been a free thinker, a free liver, and a free lover!"

"And yet," mused Alan Hawke, "his writings to-day are the pride
of Genevan scholars; his library was the nucleus of the Geneva
University; his defiant spirit broke the chains of Calvin's narrowness,
and his resistant, spiritual example caught up has made Geneva the
home of the oppressed, the central, radiant point of mental light
and liberty for the world! Geneva since 1536 has harbored the
brightest wandering Spanish, French, English, and Irish youth! Even
grim Russia cannot reclaim from the free city its wayward exiles.
France, in her distress, has found an asylum here for its helpless
nobles and expelled philosophers. I willingly take my hat off to
brave little Switzerland, where Royal Duke, proscribed patriot,
mad enthusiast, bold agnostic, and tired worldling can all find an
inviolate asylum under the majestic shadows of its mountains--by
the shores of its dreaming lakes!" Alan Hawke dropped suddenly from
the clouds as the practical Miss Genie led the way to the breakfast
rendezvous, cheerfully demonstrating her own bold ideas of social
freedom by remarking: