"Shall you be going to the trial to-night?" courteously asked the
merchant who had proven himself a master in debate, of Charm. He had
lifted his hat before he sat down, bowing to her as if he had been in a
ball-room.

"It will be fine to-night--it is the opening of the defence," he added,
as he placed carefully two lumps of sugar in his cup.

"It's always finer at night--what with the lights and the people,"
interpolated the landlady, from her perch on the door-sill. "If _ces
dames_ wish to go, I can show them the way to the galleries. Only," she
added, with a warning tone, her growing excitement obvious at the sense
of the coming pleasure, "it is like the theatre. The earlier we get
there the better the seat. I go to get my hat." And the door swallowed
her up.

"She is right--it is like a theatre," soliloquized the merchant--"and
so is life. Poor Filon!"

We should have been very content to remain where we were. The night had
fallen; the streets, as they lost themselves in dim turnings, in
mysterious alleyways, and arches that seemed grotesquely high in the
vague blur of things, were filled for us with the charm of a new and
lovely beauty. At one end the street ended in a towering mass of stone;
that doubtless was the cathedral. At the right, the narrow houses
dipped suddenly; their roof-lines were lost in vagueness. Between
the slit made by the street a deep, vast chasm opened; it was the night
filling the great width of sky, and the mists that shrouded the hill,
rising out of the sleeping earth. There was only one single line of