elter for a
night or two?"

He stopped himself, turned terribly pale, and listened intently. He
fancied he had heard a woman's scream, and his own name uttered.

"Andre, it is I--your Sabine; help!"

Quick as lightning Andre rushed to the window, opened it, and leaned out
to discover from whence those sounds came.

The young miscreant, Toto Chupin, had too fatally earned the note with
which Tantaine had bribed him. The whole of the front of the window gave
way with a loud crash, and Andre was hurled into space.

The hut was at least sixty feet from the pavement, and the fall was the
more appalling because the body of Andre struck some of the intervening
scaffolding first, and thence bounced off, until the unhappy young man
fell with a dull thud, bleeding and senseless in the street.

Nearly three hundred persons in the Champs Elysees witnessed this
hideous sight; for, at Vignol's cry, every one had stopped, and, frozen
with horror, had not missed one detail of the grim tragedy.

In an instant a crowd was collected round the poor, inert mass of
humanity which lay motionless in a pool of blood. But two workmen,
roused by Vignol's shrieks, were soon on the spot, and pushed their way
through the crowd of persons who were gazing with a morbid curiosity on
the man who had fallen from a height of sixty feet.

Andre gave no sign of life. His face was dreadfully bruised, his eyes
were closed, and a stream of blood poured from his mouth, as Vignol
raised his friend's head upon his knee.

"He is dead!" cried the lookers on. "No one could survive such a fall."

"Let us take him to the Hospital Beaujon!" exclaimed Vignol. "We are
close by there."

An ambulance was speedily procured, and the workmen, placing their
insensible friend carefully in it, asked permission to carry him to the
hospital.

One curious event had excited the attention of some of the lookers on.
Just as Andre fell, a _commissaire_ had rushed forward and seized a
woman. She was one of the class of unfortunates who frequent the Champs
Elysees, and she it was who had uttered the cry that had lured Andre to
destruction. The woman made an effort to escape, but Palot, for it was
he, caught her arm.

"Not a word," said he sternly. The wretched creature seemed in abject
terror, and obeyed him.

"Why did you cry out?" asked he.

"I do not know."

"It is a lie!"

"No, it is true; a gentleman came up to me, and said, 'Madame, if you
will cry out now, A