r Pont du Sable.' _Voila!_
That's what they'll tell you, and they mean it. All the gossip in the
world can't hurt him. Here," I cried, forcing the glass into his hand,
"get that down you, you maker of ballets, and proceed with the horrible
details, but proceed gently, merrily, with the right sort of beat in
your heart, for the cure is as much a friend of yours as he is of mine."

Tanrade shrugged his broad shoulders, and for some moments sipped his
glass. At length, he set it down on the broad table at his elbow, and
said slowly: "You know how good Alice is, how much she will do for any
one she is fond of--for a friend, I mean, like the cure. Very well, it
is not an easy thing to give a concert in Paris that earns fifteen
hundred francs for a cure whom, it is safe to say, no one in the
audience, save Germaine, Alice and myself had ever heard of. It was a
veritable _tour de force_ to organize. You were not there. I'm glad you
were not. It was a dull old concert that would not have amused you
much--Lassive fell ill at the last moment, Delmar was in a bad humour,
and the quartet had played the night before at a ball at the Elysee and
were barely awake. Yet in spite of it the theatre was packed; a chic
audience, too. Frambord came out with half a column in the _Critique des
Arts_ with a pretty compliment to Alice's executive energy, and added
'that it was one of the rare soirees of the season.' He must have been
drunk when he wrote it. I played badly--I never can play when they
gabble. It was as garrulous as a fish market in front. _Enfin!_ It was
over and we telegraphed his reverence the result; from a money
standpoint it was a '_succes fou_.'"

Tanrade leaned back and for a few seconds gazed at the ceiling of my
den.

"Where every penny has gone," he resumed, with a strained smile, "_Dieu
sait!_ There is no bell, not even the sound of one, _et voila!_"

He turned abruptly and reached for his glass, forgetting he had drained
it. A fly was buzzing on its back in the last drop. And then we both
smiled grimly, for we were thinking of Monsieur le Cure.

I rang the bell of the presbytery early the next morning, by inserting
my jackknife, to spare my fingers, in a loop at the end of a crooked
wire which dangles over the rambling wall of the cure's garden. The door
itself is of thick oak, and framed by stones overgrown with lichens--a
solid old playground for nervous lizards when the sun shines, and a
favourite sticking plac