his only
eye. She could not comprehend the existence of a being so awkwardly
fashioned. Yet there was so much sadness and so much gentleness spread
over all this, that she began to become reconciled to it.

He was the first to break the silence. "So you were telling me to
return?"

She made an affirmative sign of the head, and said, "Yes."

He understood the motion of the head. "Alas!" he said, as though
hesitating whether to finish, "I am--I am deaf."

"Poor man!" exclaimed the Bohemian, with an expression of kindly pity.

He began to smile sadly.

"You think that that was all that I lacked, do you not? Yes, I am
deaf, that is the way I am made. 'Tis horrible, is it not? You are so
beautiful!"

There lay in the accents of the wretched man so profound a consciousness
of his misery, that she had not the strength to say a word. Besides, he
would not have heard her. He went on,--

"Never have I seen my ugliness as at the present moment. When I compare
myself to you, I feel a very great pity for myself, poor unhappy monster
that I am! Tell me, I must look to you like a beast. You, you are a
ray of sunshine, a drop of dew, the song of a bird! I am something
frightful, neither man nor animal, I know not what, harder, more
trampled under foot, and more unshapely than a pebble stone!"

Then he began to laugh, and that laugh was the most heartbreaking thing
in the world. He continued,--

"Yes, I am deaf; but you shall talk to me by gestures, by signs. I have
a master who talks with me in that way. And then, I shall very soon know
your wish from the movement of your lips, from your look."

"Well!" she interposed with a smile, "tell me why you saved me."

He watched her attentively while she was speaking.

"I understand," he replied. "You ask me why I saved you. You have
forgotten a wretch who tried to abduct you one night, a wretch to whom
you rendered succor on the following day on their infamous pillory. A
drop of water and a little pity,--that is more than I can repay with my
life. You have forgotten that wretch; but he remembers it."

She listened to him with profound tenderness. A tear swam in the eye of
the bellringer, but did not fall. He seemed to make it a sort of point
of honor to retain it.

"Listen," he resumed, when he was no longer afraid that the tear would
escape; "our towers here are very high, a man who should fall from them
would be dead before touching the pavement; when it shall please you