Monsieur Guillot was a man of emotional temperament.

For more than an hour after Granet had left him, he paced up and down his little room, stood before the high windows which overlooked the Thames, raised his hands above his head and gazed with flashing eyes into the future--such a future! All his life he had been a schemer, his eyes turned towards the big things, yet with himself always occupying the one glorified place in the centre of the arena.

He was, in one sense of the word, a patriot, but it was the meanest and smallest sense.

There was no great France for him in which his was not the commanding figure.

In every dream of that wonderful future, of a more splendid and triumphant France, he saw himself on the pinnacle of fame, himself acclaimed by millions the strong great man, the liberator.