“He is afraid!” broke from Fulvia.  She admired and respected Crescenti, yet she had never fully trusted him.  The taint of ecclesiasticism was on him.

Odo smiled.  “He has never been afraid of facing the charge of Jansenism,” he replied.  “All his life he has stood in open opposition to the Church party.”

“It is one thing to criticise their dogmas, another to attack their privileges.  At such a time he is bound to remember that he is a priest—­that he is one of them.”

“Yet, as you have often pointed out, it is to the clergy that France in great measure owes her release from feudalism.”

She smiled coldly.  “France would have won her cause without the clergy!”

“This is not France, then,” he said with a sigh.  After a moment he began again:  “Can you not see that any reform which aims at reducing the power of the clergy must be more easily and successfully carried out if they can be induced to take part in it?  That, in short, we need them at this moment as we have never needed them before?  The example of France ought at least to show you that.”

“The example of France shows me that, to gain a point in such a struggle, any means must be used!  In France, as you say, the clergy were with the people—­here they are against them.  Where persuasion fails coercion must be used!”

Odo smiled faintly.  “You might have borrowed that from their own armoury,” he said.

She coloured at the sarcasm.  “Why not?” she retorted.  “Let them have a taste of their own methods!  They know the kind of pressure that makes men yield—­when they feel it they will know what to do.”

He looked at her with astonishment.  “This is Gamba’s tone,” he said.  “I have never heard you speak in this way before.”

She coloured again; and now with a profound emotion.  “Yes,” she said, “it is Gamba’s tone.  He and I speak for the same cause and with the same voice.  We are of the people and we speak for the people.  Who are your other counsellors?  Priests and noblemen!  It is natural enough that they should wish to make their side of the question heard.  Listen to them, if you will—­conciliate them, if you can!  We need all the allies we can win.  Only do not fancy they are really speaking for the people.  Do not think it is the people’s voice you hear.  The people do not ask you to weigh this claim against that, to look too curiously into the defects and merits of every clause in their charter.  All they ask is that the charter should be given them!”

She spoke with the low-voiced passion that possessed her at such moments.  All acrimony had vanished from her tone.  The expression of a great conviction had swept aside every personal animosity, and cleared the sources of her deepest feeling.  Odo felt the pressure of her emotion.  He leaned to her and their hands met.

“It shall be given them,” he said.

She lifted her face to his.  It shone with a great light.  Once before he had seen it so illumined, but with how different a brightness!  The remembrance stirred in him some old habit of the senses.  He bent over and kissed her.