aked youth bending over him.

Professor Anatole does not remember clearly what followed. Certain it
is that he and the lad must have carried the wounded man up the narrow
stair. For when Anatole came a little to himself they were, all the
three of them, in his wide, bare attiring-chamber, from which it was his
custom to issue forth, gowned and solemn, in the midst of an admiring
hush, with the roll of his daily lecture clasped in his right hand,
while he upheld the long and troublesome academic skirts with the other.

But now, all suddenly, among these familiar cupboards and books of
reference, he found himself with a dying man--or rather, as it seemed, a
man already dead. And, what troubled him far more, with a lad whose long
hair, becoming loosened, floated down upon his shoulders, while he wept
long and continuously, "Oh--oh--oh--my father!" sobbing from the top of
his throat.

Now Professor Anatole was a wise man, a philosopher even. It was the day
of _mignons_. The word was invented then. King Henry III. had always
half-a-dozen or so, not counting D'Epernon and La Joyeuse. That might
account for the long hair. But even a _mignon_ would not have cried
"Ah--ah--ah!" in quick, rending sobs from the chest and diaphragm.

He, Anatole Long, Professor of Eloquence at the Sorbonne, was in
presence of a great difficulty--the greatest of his life. There was a
dead man in his robing-room, and a girl with long hair, who wept in
tremulous contralto.

What if some of his students were minded to come back! A terrible
thought! But there was small fear of that. The rascals were all out
shouting for the Duke of Guise and helping to build the great barricades
which shut in the Swiss like rats in a trap. They were Leaguers to a
man, these Sorbonne students--for fun, however, not from devotion.

Yet when he went back to the big empty class-room to bethink himself a
little (it was a good twenty years since he had been accustomed to this
sort of thing), lo! there were two young fellows rooting about among the
coats and cloaks, from the midst of which he had taken his sword-cane
when he ran downstairs.

"What are you doing there?" he cried, with a sudden quick anger, as if
students of eloquence had no right in the class-room of their own
Professor. "Answer me, you, Guy Launay, and you, John d'Albret!"

"We are looking for----" began Guy Launay, the son of the ex-provost of
the merchants, a dour, dark clod of a lad, with the finger