affection and native grace,
gulped out in a broken voice, "Railest on women--and art--like
them--with thy pretty ways. Thy mother's milk is in thee still. Satan
would love thee, or--le bon Dieu would kick him out of hell for shaming
it. Give me thy hand! Give me thy hand! May" (a tremendous oath) "if I
let thee out of my sight till Italy."

And so the staunch friends were more than reconciled after their short
tiff.

The next day the thieves were tried. The pieces de conviction were
reduced in number, to the great chagrin of the little clerk, by the
interment of the bones. But there was still a pretty show. A thief's
hand struck off flagrante delicto; a murdered woman's hair; the Abbot's
axe, and other tools of crime. The skulls, etc., were sworn to by the
constables who had found them. Evidence was lax in that age and place.
They all confessed but the landlord. And Manon was called to bring the
crime home to him. Her evidence was conclusive. He made a vain attempt
to shake her credibility by drawing from her that her own sweetheart had
been one of the gang, and that she had held her tongue so long as he
was alive. The public prosecutor came to the aid of his witness,
and elicited that a knife had been held to her throat, and her own
sweetheart sworn with solemn oaths to kill her should she betray them,
and that this terrible threat, and not the mere fear of death, had glued
her lips.

The other thieves were condemned to be hanged, and the landlord to be
broken on the wheel. He uttered a piercing cry when his sentence was
pronounced.

As for poor Manon, she became the subject of universal criticism. Nor
did opinion any longer run dead in her favour; it divided into two broad
currents. And strange to relate, the majority of her own sex took her
part, and the males were but equally divided; which hardly happens once
in a hundred years. Perhaps some lady will explain the phenomenon. As
for me, I am a little shy of explaining things I don't understand. It
has become so common. Meantime, had she been a lover of notoriety, she
would have been happy, for the town talked of nothing but her. The poor
girl, however, had but one wish to escape the crowd that followed her,
and hide her head somewhere where she could cry over her "pendard,"
whom all these proceedings brought vividly back to her affectionate
remembrance. Before he was hanged he had threatened her life; but she
was not one of your fastidious girls, who love thei