ination I don't know. At any rate
honour was saved. Paragot laid aside his pipe and looked wistfully into
the past over his wine bowl.

"The Lady of the Lake," he murmured. "I have called her many things good
and bad in my time, but never that. You are a genius, my little
Asticot."

He finished his wine slowly, holding the bowl in both hands. The moon
smiled at us in a friendly way, sailing high over the mountains. There
entered my head the novel reflection that he was smiling on all men
alike, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust. He was smiling
just the same on Joanna's beaky-nosed husband.

Her husband! Something caught at my heart. Did Paragot know? I debated
anxiously in my mind whether I should impart the disastrous information.
If he knew that she was a married woman he would put foolish thoughts
out of his head, for it was only in Merovingian and such like romantic
epochs that men loved other men's wives. I touched him timidly on the
arm.

"Master,--I overheard something else."

"Did you?"

"She is married, and that is her husband."

"Did he take off his hat?"

"No, Master."

"He is a scaly-headed vulture," said Paragot dreamily.

"He only gave me five sous," said I, relieved and yet disappointed at
finding that my disclosure produced no agitation.

Paragot fumbled in his pocket. "We will not batten on his charity," said
he, and he cast three or four coppers into the silent street. They
crashed, rolled and fell over with little chinks. Narcisse who had
hitherto been asleep trotted out and sniffed at them. Paragot laughed;
then checked himself, and holding up a long-nailed forefinger looked at
me with an air of awful solemnity.

"Listen to the wisdom of Paragot. There is not a woman worth a clean man
that does not marry a scaly-headed vulture."

He murmured an incoherence or two, and there was then a long silence.
Presently his head knocked sharply against the lintel. I roused him.

"Master, it won't be good for us to sit any longer in the moonshine."

He turned a glazed look on me. "Minerva's Owl," said he, "I am quite
aware of it."

He rose and lumbered into the inn, and I, having guided him up the
narrow staircase to his room, descended to my bunk in a corner of the
tiny salon. My sleeping arrangements were always sketchy.

In the morning when I questioned him as to our departure from Aix, he
affected not to understand, and told me that I had been dreaming and
that the moonshine