What was his brain busy about as he rolled out of the wicked, seductive city, where all vice betakes itself with the hope of being tempted, in that chill spring evening, between the lamps and the stars? His head was confused with all he had passed through. The fumes of his “pleasures” were still in it, mingled with the disgust which is inevitable, but which floats away still more quickly than the fumes of the “pleasures.” The thrill of his hairbreadth escape was also vibrating through him; but a man of Frederick Eastwood’s habits soon gets used to that thrill of escape. He was concocting and putting in order a reasonable way of accounting for his acquaintance with such a man as Batty, should it ever become known to his friends. All at once, while he was arranging his bargain with Batty, this had flashed upon his mind. He would not conceal that, having a day or two to pass in Paris, he had determined on going to a purely French hotel, to escape the mass of travelling English who fill up every corner; with the view of seeing Frenchmen as they are, he had gone to this obscure hostelrie; and there, by an odd chance, he had found this rough Englishman stranded, not knowing the language--thrown, as it were, upon his charity. “A scamp, of course, and thoroughly objectionable; but what could one do?” Frederick said to himself, as he made up his story. His story seemed to himself so satisfactory that it really accounted for the acquaintance, even to his own mind. He recalled to recollection that he had been obliged to interpret for his unpleasant compatriot, and the fiction gradually consolidated into fact. He believed it himself long before he had reached the Marseilles steamboat which was the next step in his hurried way. CHAPTER VI. PISA.