I will follow you, honoured sir, to----" "The Porte Tertasse." "Mercier would meet us, by your leave," Louis rejoined with a faint grin.
The magistrate glared at the tool who on a sudden was turned adviser.
Still, for the time he must humour him.

"The mills, then, on the bridge," he muttered.

And he opened the door with care and went out.
With a dreadful sense of coming evil he went along the Corraterie and took his way down the steep to the bridge which, far below, curbed the blue rushing waters of the Rhone.

The roar of the icy torrent and of the busy mills, stupendous as it was, was not loud enough to deaden the two words that clung to his ears, "Too late! Too late!" Nor did the frosty sunshine, gloriously reflected from the line of snowy peaks to eastward, avail to pierce the gloom in which he walked.

For Louis Gentilis, if it should turn out that he had inflicted this penance for naught, there was preparing an evil hour.
The magistrate turned aside on a part of the bridge between two mills.
With his back to the wind-swept lake and its wide expanse of ruffled waves, he stood a little apart from the current of crossers, on a space kept clear of loiterers by the keen breeze.