it was nearly abreast of the fiddler, noiselessly,
and then, with the cessation of a quick padding sound of bare feet,
appeared a small, black-smocked boy, his sabots under his arm, his face
white with anger.

"Stop it!" he cried, "stop it!"

The old man turned. "Stop what, little seigneur," he asked with surly
amusement. "Does the high road belong to you?"

"You must stop it, I say, I cannot bear it."

The fiddler rose and danced about scraping more hideously than before.
"Ho, ho," he laughed, "ho, ho, ho, ho!"

The child threw his arms over his head in a gesture of unconscious
melodrama. "I cannot bear it--you are hurting it--I--I will kill you if
you do not stop." And he flew at his enemy, using his close-cropped
bullet-head as a battering ram.

For some seconds the absurd battle continued, and then, as unexpectedly
as he had begun it, the boy gave it up, and as the fiddler laughed
harshly, and the fiddle screeched, threw himself on the warm, dusty
grass and cried aloud.

There was a pause, after which, in silence, the old man groped his way
to the boy and knelt by him. "Hush, _mon petit_," he beseeched, "old
Luc-Ange is a monster to tease you. Do not cry, do not cry."

A curious apple, leaning over to listen, fell from its bough and dropped
with a thud into the grass.

The little Norman sat up. "I am not crying," he declared, turning a
brown, pugnacious face towards his late foe, "see, there are no tears."

The man touched his cheeks and eyelids delicately with his dirty
fingers. "True--no tears. But--why, why did you----"

"I was screaming because that noise was so horrible."

"And--that noise gave you pain?"

Bullet-Head frowned. Like all Normans, he resented his mental privacy
being intruded on by questions.

"Not pain; it gives me a horrible, hollow feeling in my inside," he
admitted grudgingly, "just under the belt."

After a moment he added, his dark eyes fixed angrily on the violin, "I
hate violins; they are dreadful things. M. Chalumeau had one. I broke
it."

The blind man laughed gratingly. "Because it made such a horrible
noise?"

"Yes."

Another pause, and then the man's expression of vacant malice turned to
one pitiful to see, one of indistinct yearning. "Give it to me," he
muttered, "they say I am half mad, and perhaps I am, but--I think I
could play once----" The yellow dog snapped at a fly, and his master
turned towards him, adding, "Before your time, Papillon, long before."