sat quite unmoved,
looking at him with calm shining eyes, and, somehow or other, Monsieur
the Viscount lacked strength or heart to kill it. He stood doubtful
for a moment, and then a sudden feeling of weakness obliged him to
drop the stone, and sit down, while tears sprang to his eyes with the
sense of his helplessness.

"Why should I kill it?" he said, bitterly. "The beast will live and
grow fat upon this damp and loathsomeness, long after they have put
an end to my feeble life. It shall remain. The cell is not big, but it
is big enough for us both. However large be the rooms a man builds
himself to live in, it needs but little space in which to die!"

So Monsieur the Viscount dragged his pallet away from the toad, placed
another stone by it, and removed the pitcher; and then, wearied with
his efforts, lay down and slept heavily.

When he awoke, on the new stone by the pitcher was the toad, staring
full at him with topaz eyes. He lay still this time and did not move,
for the animal showed no intention of spitting, and he was puzzled by
its tameness.

"It seems to like the sight of a man," he thought. "Is it possible
that any former inmate of this wretched prison can have amused his
solitude by making a pet of such a creature? and if there were such a
man, where is he now?"

Henceforward, sleeping or waking, whenever Monsieur the Viscount lay
down upon his pallet, the toad crawled up on to the stone, and kept
watch over him with shining lustrous eyes; but whenever there was a
sound of the key grating in the lock, and the gaoler coming his
rounds, away crept the toad, and was quickly lost in the dark corners
of the room. When the man was gone, it returned to its place, and
Monsieur the Viscount would talk to it, as he lay on his pallet.

"Ah! Monsieur Crapaud," he would say, with mournful pleasantry,
"without doubt you have had a master and a kind one; but, tell me, who
was he, and where is he now? Was he old or young, and was it in the
last stage of maddening loneliness that he made friends with such a
creature as you?"

Monsieur Crapaud looked very intelligent, but he made no reply, and
Monsieur the Viscount had recourse to Antoine.

"Who was in this cell before me?" he asked at the gaoler's next visit.

Antoine's face clouded. "Monsieur le Cure had this room. My orders
were that he was to be imprisoned in secret.'"

Monsieur le Cure had this room. There was a revelation in those words.
It was all explain