nningly prepared for him."

"Tell me, tell me! Speak!" Climene implored him, holding out her hands
in a supplication no man of sensibility could have resisted. And then
on the instant she caught her breath on a faint scream. "My father!" she
exclaimed, turning distractedly from one to the other of those two. "He
is coming! We are lost!"

"You must fly, Climene!" said M. Leandre.

"Too late!" she sobbed. "Too late! He is here."

"Calm, mademoiselle, calm!" the subtle friend was urging her. "Keep calm
and trust to me. I promise you that all shall be well."

"Oh!" cried M. Leandre, limply. "Say what you will, my friend, this is
ruin--the end of all our hopes. Your wits will never extricate us from
this. Never!"

Through the gap strode now an enormous man with an inflamed moon
face and a great nose, decently dressed after the fashion of a solid
bourgeois. There was no mistaking his anger, but the expression that it
found was an amazement to Andre-Louis.

"Leandre, you're an imbecile! Too much phlegm, too much phlegm! Your
words wouldn't convince a ploughboy! Have you considered what they mean
at all? Thus," he cried, and casting his round hat from him in a broad
gesture, he took his stand at M. Leandre's side, and repeated the very
words that Leandre had lately uttered, what time the three observed him
coolly and attentively.

"Oh, say what you will, my friend, this is ruin--the end of all our
hopes. Your wits will never extricate us from this. Never!"

A frenzy of despair vibrated in his accents. He swung again to face M.
Leandre. "Thus," he bade him contemptuously. "Let the passion of your
hopelessness express itself in your voice. Consider that you are not
asking Scaramouche here whether he has put a patch in your breeches. You
are a despairing lover expressing..."

He checked abruptly, startled. Andre-Louis, suddenly realizing what was
afoot, and how duped he had been, had loosed his laughter. The sound
of it pealing and booming uncannily under the great roof that so
immediately confined him was startling to those below.

The fat man was the first to recover, and he announced it after his own
fashion in one of the ready sarcasms in which he habitually dealt.

"Hark!" he cried, "the very gods laugh at you, Leandre." Then he
addressed the roof of the barn and its invisible tenant. "Hi! You
there!"

Andre-Louis revealed himself by a further protrusion of his tousled
head.

"Good-morning," said he, pleasan