o
might perhaps relent. It was a chance. It was worth trying at least, and
he would go and see.

On the way, two little accidents happened to him which coloured his
musings in a very different manner. For, first, he fell in with the
track of a patrol, and walked in it for some hundred yards, although
it lay out of his direction. And this spirited him up; at least he had
confused his trail; for he was still possessed with the idea of people
tracking him all about Paris over the snow, and collaring him next
morning before he was awake. The other matter affected him quite
differently. He passed a street-corner where, not so long before, a
woman and her child had been devoured by wolves. This was just the kind
of weather, he reflected, when wolves might take it into their heads to
enter Paris again; and a lone man in these deserted streets would run
the chance of something worse than a mere scare. He stopped and looked
upon the place with an unpleasant interest--it was a centre where
several lanes intersected each other; and he looked down them all, one
after another, and held his breath to listen, lest he should detect some
galloping black things on the snow or hear the sound of howling between
him and the river. He remembered his mother telling him the story and
pointing out the spot, while he was yet a child. His mother! If he
only knew where she lived, he might make sure at least of shelter. He
determined he would inquire upon the morrow; nay, he would go and see
her, too, poor old girl! So thinking, he arrived at his destination--his
last hope for the night.

The house was quite dark, like its neighbours; and yet after a few
taps he heard a movement overhead, a door opening, and a cautious voice
asking who was there. The poet named himself in a loud whisper, and
waited, not without some trepidation, the result. Nor had he to wait
long. A window was suddenly opened, and a pailful of slops splashed down
upon the door-step. Villon had not been unprepared for something of the
sort, and had put himself as much in shelter as the nature of the porch
admitted; but for all that he was deplorably drenched below the waist.
His hose began to freeze almost at once. Death from cold and exposure
stared him in the face; he remembered he was of phthisical tendency, and
began coughing tentatively. But the gravity of the danger steadied his
nerves. He stopped a few hundred yards from the door where he had been
so rudely used, and refle