whole city howling, running, panting after him. Nevertheless, he kept
his ideas and his presence of mind. Presently he reached the wall of the
garden of his house. The place was perfectly silent, and he thought he
had foiled his pursuers, though a distant murmur of the tumult came to
his ears like the roaring of the sea. He dipped some water from a brook
and drank it. Then, observing a pile of stones on the road, he hid
his treasure in it; obeying one of those vague thoughts which come to
criminals at a moment when the faculty to judge their actions under all
bearings deserts them, and they think to establish their innocence by
want of proof of their guilt.

That done, he endeavored to assume a placid countenance; he even tried
to smile as he rapped softly on the door of his house, hoping that no
one saw him. He raised his eyes, and through the outer blinds of one
window came a gleam of light from his wife's room. Then, in the midst of
his trouble, visions of her gentle life, spent with her children, beat
upon his brain with the force of a hammer. The maid opened the door,
which Diard hastily closed behind him with a kick. For a moment he
breathed freely; then, noticing that he was bathed in perspiration,
he sent the servant back to Juana and stayed in the darkness of the
passage, where he wiped his face with his handkerchief and put his
clothes in order, like a dandy about to pay a visit to a pretty woman.
After that he walked into a track of the moonlight to examine his hands.
A quiver of joy passed over him as he saw that no blood stains were on
them; the hemorrhage from his victim's body was no doubt inward.

But all this took time. When at last he mounted the stairs to Juana's
room he was calm and collected, and able to reflect on his position,
which resolved itself into two ideas: to leave the house, and get to the
wharves. He did not _think_ these ideas, he _saw_ them written in fiery
letters on the darkness. Once at the wharves he could hide all day,
return at night for his treasure, then conceal himself, like a rat,
in the hold of some vessel and escape without any one suspecting
his whereabouts. But to do all this, money, gold, was his first
necessity,--and he did not possess one penny.

The maid brought a light to show him up.

"Felicie," he said, "don't you hear a noise in the street, shouts,
cries? Go and see what it means, and come and tell me."

His wife, in her white dressing-gown, was sitting at a