was a trifle snarled in his top-hamper.

This whisper was helped into circulation by many trivial eccentricities
of manner, and by the unaccountable oddness of some of his transactions
in business.

"My dear sir!" cried his astounded lawyer, one day, "you are not running
a charitable institution!"

"How do you know?" said Monsieur Vignevielle. There the conversation
ceased.

"Why do you not found hospitals and asylums at once," asked the
attorney, at another time, with a vexed laugh, "and get the credit of
it?"

"And make the end worse than the beginning,' said the banker, with a
gentle smile, turning away to a desk of books.

"Bah!" muttered Jean Thompson.

Monsieur Vignevielle betrayed one very bad symptom. Wherever he went he
seemed looking for somebody. It may have been perceptible only to those
who were sufficiently interested in him to study his movements; but
those who saw it once saw it always. He never passed an open door or
gate but he glanced in; and often, where it stood but slightly ajar, you
might see him give it a gentle push with his hand or cane It was very
singular.

He walked much alone after dark. The _gurchinangoes_ (garroters, we
might say), at those times the city's particular terror by night, never
crossed his path. He was one of those men for whom danger appears to
stand aside.

One beautiful summer night, when all nature seemed hushed in ecstasy,
the last blush gone that told of the sun's parting, Monsieur
Vignevielle, in the course of one of those contemplative, uncompanioned
walks which it was his habit to take, came slowly along the more open
portion of the Rue Royale, with a step which was soft without intention,
occasionally touching the end of his stout cane gently to the ground and
looking upward among his old acquaintances, the stars.

It was one of those southern nights under whose spell all the sterner
energies of the mind cloak themselves and lie down in bivouac, and the
fancy and the imagination, that cannot sleep, slip their fetters and
escape, beckoned away from behind every flowering bush and
sweet-smelling tree, and every stretch of lonely, half-lighted walk, by
the genius of poetry. The air stirred softly now and then, and was still
again, as if the breezes lifted their expectant pinions and lowered them
once more, awaiting the rising of the moon in a silence which fell upon
the fields, the roads, the gardens, the walls, and the suburban and
half-suburban streets