"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.

France, in her distress, has found an asylum here for its helpless nobles and expelled philosophers.