I
think that I will start into this strange partnership with a better
stock of family history than even this remarkably self-possessed
young woman, who seems to be the heiress of some old family vendetta."
The Major laughed as he heard the mills of the gods grinding out a
golden grist of the future. But lifted up beyond the impulses of
his itching palm the sight of the delicate, girlish face of the
Rosebud of Delhi had caused him to dream the strangest dreams. "Why
not?" he murmured as he wandered back to the hotel and privately
indulged in a petit verre before his rendezvous with Miss Genie,
the belle of the West Side. Major Alan Hawke was in "great form"
as he piloted the bright-eyed, willful Chicago girl through the dim
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.
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