uld try the house of his adopted
father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.

He ran all the way, and knocked timidly. There was no answer. He knocked
again and again, taking heart with every stroke; and at last steps
were heard approaching from within. A barred wicket fell open in the
iron-studded door, and emitted a gush of yellow light.

"Hold up your face to the wicket," said the chaplain from within.

"It's only me," whimpered Villon.

"Oh, it's only you, is it?" returned the chaplain; and he cursed him
with foul, unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour, and bade
him be off to hell, where he came from.

"My hands are blue to the wrist," pleaded Villon; "my feet are dead and
full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold lies at my
heart. I may be dead before morning. Only this once, father, and, before
God, I will never ask again!"

"You should have come earlier," said the ecclesiastic, coolly. "Young
men require a lesson now and then." He shut the wicket and retired
deliberately into the interior of the house.

Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and
feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.

"Wormy old fox!" he cried. "If I had my hand under your twist, I would
send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit."

A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long
passages. He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath. And then the
humour of the situation struck him, and he laughed and looked lightly up
to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking over his discomfiture.

What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the frosty streets.
The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination, and gave him a
hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early night might very
well happen to him before morning. And he so young! And with such
immense possibilities of disorderly amusement before him! He felt quite
pathetic over the notion of his own fate, as if it had been some one
else's, and made a little imaginative vignette of the scene in the
morning when they should find his body.

He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between his
thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was on bad terms with some old
friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a plight. He had
lampooned them in verses; he had beaten and cheated them; and yet now,
when he was in so close a pinch, he thought there was at least one wh