stage in my reflections when we passed beneath the windows of the club to which my cousin belonged when he lived at home, I had heard my sister on one occasion call it a 'hell.' The word came back to my mind, and with it a sudden vision of hell such as Abbé Martel, you remember, used to describe in a way to make our flesh creep. 'If I take those ten francs,' I said to myself suddenly, 'it is stealing; and to steal is a mortal sin.' I saw myself damned. 'I'll give the ten francs to the first beggar,' I thought. 'But suppose we don't meet any?' Not one had I seen since we left my uncle's house. 'Well, if I don't meet one, I shall tell my cousin to-morrow, and I know he won't take the money back.' I reasoned thus, but I knew very well that I was telling myself a lie. We had to pass before the portico of the Capucin chapel. It was the regular rendezvous of beggars, and on Christmas eve they were sure to be there, waiting for the faithful who attended the midnight mass. It was one of the corners of the old town which we knew the best, for old Mother Giraud kept a stall there, where she sold apples in the autumn, barley-sugar in winter, and cherries, tied by a thread to a little stick, in spring. The angle of the portico served as a niche for a blind man, in whose withered face were two white eyes half covered by lids suffused with blood. Can't you see him now,—moving his head about and
