from between them looked out
a pale and haggard man's face.

It will be guessed that this third inhabitant of the sixth floor attic
was no other than Jean Didier, whose name had been entered in the
_bureau_ of police--when they tried to get some imperfect statistics of
missing men--as "Jean Didier, glazier; fought with the insurgents,
wounded at the barricade of the Rue Soleil d'Or, May 28th, 1871;
denounced as Communist by Andre Fort; executed on the spot."
Nevertheless, for once the police were wrong. Jean was not shot, though
it was true he was shot at. Fear, or loss of blood, or an instinctive
effort at self-preservation, caused him to reel and fall just a second
before a couple of bullets which should have found a home in his body,
spent themselves in the blood-stained wall over his head. The tide of
slaughter ebbed away, leaving ghastly heaps of dead men. From one of
these a shadow by-and-by detached itself, and drifted homewards, to the
spot where Marie was waiting in terrible anguish.

Her courage came back with the need for it; it took very little to add
to the disguise which fire and a wound had brought upon him; the people
in the house were at that moment much occupied with dragging down the
papers they had pasted over their windows. He crawled upstairs, and when
she had hastily bound up his wound, and given him some food, he managed
to get out on the roof through the trap-door. There he spent three days,
coming down at night, till she was able to put up her new chintz
curtains, and here in the garret he had remained ever since, sometimes
fairly patient, sometimes finding his lot insupportable, and railing at
fate, at Marie, and at Providence. He had had a few narrow escapes, but
his wife was as cunning as a fox when he was concerned, and fortune had
favoured him.

Perine's presence had a double aspect. The loneliness of the position
was so difficult for a man of his temperament to support, that he
welcomed it at times as a distraction, and these exercises of the
strange ingenuity of brain which she possessed, at the cost, as it
seemed, of all other intelligences, would very often interest and amuse
him. On the other hand she was quite as valuable as a grievance. If he
had no other fault to find with his wife, he could always blame her for
suffering the idiot girl to hang about the place, and the relief of this
was enormous. On the present occasion he contemplated her broad back
with displeasure.

"Wretc