cceeded by a dish of meat, and that by a dish
of vegetables. He ate all that was placed before him, emptied his bottle
of wine, called for a glass of rum, and smoked his cigarette with
his cup of coffee. As he became refreshed, he became overbearing; and
patronised the company at the Daybreak in certain small talk at which he
assisted, as if his condition were far above his appearance.

The company might have had other engagements, or they might have felt
their inferiority, but in any case they dispersed by degrees, and not
being replaced by other company, left their new patron in possession of
the Break of Day. The landlord was clinking about in his kitchen; the
landlady was quiet at her work; and the refreshed traveller sat smoking
by the stove, warming his ragged feet.

'Pardon me, madame--that Biraud.'

'Rigaud, monsieur.'

'Rigaud. Pardon me again--has contracted your displeasure, how?'

The landlady, who had been at one moment thinking within herself that
this was a handsome man, at another moment that this was an ill-looking
man, observed the nose coming down and the moustache going up, and
strongly inclined to the latter decision. Rigaud was a criminal, she
said, who had killed his wife.

'Ay, ay? Death of my life, that's a criminal indeed. But how do you know
it?'

'All the world knows it.'

'Hah! And yet he escaped justice?'

'Monsieur, the law could not prove it against him to its satisfaction.
So the law says. Nevertheless, all the world knows he did it. The people
knew it so well, that they tried to tear him to pieces.'

'Being all in perfect accord with their own wives?' said the guest.

'Haha!'

The landlady of the Break of Day looked at him again, and felt almost
confirmed in her last decision. He had a fine hand, though, and he
turned it with a great show. She began once more to think that he was
not ill-looking after all.

'Did you mention, madame--or was it mentioned among the gentlemen--what
became of him?' The landlady shook her head; it being the first
conversational stage at which her vivacious earnestness had ceased to
nod it, keeping time to what she said. It had been mentioned at the
Daybreak, she remarked, on the authority of the journals, that he had
been kept in prison for his own safety. However that might be, he had
escaped his deserts; so much the worse.

The guest sat looking at her as he smoked out his final cigarette, and
as she sat with her head bent over her work, w