tlemen who approached such familiarity, and who plumed herself on
her invulnerability to the masculine wiles that beset her sex. And
what might have been deemed still more foreign to her nature, she
never said a word from that moment until the voiture drew up in front
of her place of residence in the venerable but not venerated Rue St.
Jacques.

"Voila!" she then exclaimed, though it had not the tone of entire
satisfaction.

"Hold on, little one, I will pay----"

But he discovered that those who had cared for him had also
benevolently relieved him of his valuables. He had not a sou.

"The wretches!" cried the girl.

"They might have left me my keys, at least," he muttered.

"And your watch, monsieur?" she asked, apprehensively.

"Gone, of course!"

"Oh, the miserable cowards!"

He was less moved than she at the loss. It seemed trifling by the side
of his other misfortunes.

But the coachman was interested. He carefully noted the number of the
house again, and when she passed up his fare looked into her face with
a knowing leer.

"If monsieur wishes to go back to the Prefecture," he said to her,
tentatively.

"Oh, no!" said Jean.

The girl, however, understood the significance of this inquiry, and
coldly demanded the man's number.

"If Mademoiselle Fouchette should need you again," she added, putting
the slip in her pocket, "she will know where to find you."

And to the manifest astonishment of the cabman, who could not divine
what a woman of Rue St. Jacques would want with a man without money,
or at least valuables, she slipped her arm through Jean's and entered
the house.

The shaded lamp turned low threw a dim light over a little table
simply but neatly set for two in Mlle. Fouchette's chamber. A cold cut
of beef, some delicate slices of boiled tongue, an open box of
sardines, a plate heaped with cold red cabbage, a lemon, olives,
etc.,--all fresh from the rotisserie and charcuterie below,--were
flanked by a metre of bread and a litre of Bordeaux. The spread looked
quite appetizing and formidable.

Absorbed as he was in himself, Jean could not but note the certainty
implied in all of this preparation. Mlle. Fouchette could not have
known that he would be at liberty, yet she had arranged things exactly
as if she had possessed this foreknowledge. If they had not made a
mistake and let him off so easily----

"You were, then, sure I would come?"

"Very sure," said she, without turning from the s