of presiding at a ceremony. "Then you don't know? You haven't heard?"

Comprehension lit in her face; she uttered a wretched little laugh.

"Ah, v'la de la comedie!" she cried. "No, I haven't got him. They
have taken him from me. They have taken him, and in there"--her
forefinger shot out and pointed to the wall and beyond it--"in there,
in a room full of people who stare and listen, they are making him
into a murderer."

"Then--parbleu!" The little official was seized by comprehension as
by a fit. "Then there is an artist--the artist of whom you talk--who
is one of the apaches! It is unbelievable!"

At the word apaches the girl turned on him with teeth bared as though
in a snarl. But at the sound of Rufin's voice she subsided.

"What is his name--quickly?" he demanded.

"Giaconi," she answered.

Rufin looked his question at the little official, who turned to the
girl.

"Peter the Lucky?" he queried.

She nodded dejectedly.

The little official made a grimace. "It was he," he said, "who did
the throat-cutting. Tiens! this begins to be a drama."

The girl, with drooping head, made a faint moan of protest and
misery. Rufin signed the little man to be silent. The truth, if he
had but given it entertainment, had offered itself to him from the
first. All he had heard of the man, Papa Musard's slanderous-sounding
complaints of him, the fat concierge's reports of his violence, had
gathered towards this culmination. He had insisted upon thinking of
him as a full-blooded man of genius, riotously making little of
conventions, a creature abounding in life, tinctured a little,
perhaps, with the madness that may spice the mind of a visionary and
enrage his appetites. It was a figure ha had created to satisfy
himself.

"It was false art," he reflected. "That is me--false art!"

Still, whatever he had seen wrongly, there was still the picture.
Apache, murderer, and all the rest--the fellow had painted the
picture. No one verdict can account for both art and morals, and
there was reason to fear, it seemed, that the law which executed a
murderer would murder a painter at the same time--and such a painter!

"No," said Rufin, unconsciously speaking aloud--"no; they must not
kill him."

"Ah, M'sieur!" It was a cry from the girl, whose composure had
broken utterly at his words. "You are also an artist--you know!"

In a hysteria of supplication she flung herself forward and was on
her knees at his feet. She lifted clasp