He could have understood a moral shrinking from the enterprise on which they were both embarked--the betrayal of the city that gave them shelter.

He could have understood--he had superstition enough--a moral distaste for alchemy and those practices of the black art which his mind connected with it.

But this superiority of the scholar, this aloofness, not from the treachery, but from the handicraft, was beyond him.

For that reason it imposed on him the more.
Not the less, however, was he importunate to know wherein Basterga trusted.

To rave of Scholarship and Scaliger was one thing, to bring Blondel into the plot which was to transfer Geneva to Savoy and strike the heaviest blow at the Reformed that had been struck in that generation, was another thing and one remote.