“They might take you instead. I will assure them you are wicked too--that I heard you say so to monsieur the Englishman.” She shook him so that his heels knocked on the floor. For the moment she was beside herself. “The Englishman!” she hissed--and choked. “_Est-ce bien possible_! _Sang Dieu_!--_O, sang Dieu_! and if it were not for thee--he hates children--he might be now----!” She checked herself with a desperate effort. She tightened her grip. The boy screamed with pain. “Be quiet!” she cried furiously. “If some one should hear thee!” “I want them to. I want them all to come in, that I may tell how you pretended to be blind that monsieur might kiss you.” She recognised in a moment that he was goaded at last to terrible revolt. She cried “Hush!” in a panic, and without avail. The child continued to shriek and to revile her--repeating himself hysterically in the lack of a sufficient vocabulary. Changing front, it was only after long and frantic effort that she could coax and bribe him into silence. And, when at length she had induced him to a reasonable mood, and could trust herself away from him, she went and threw herself upon her bed and, perhaps for the first time in her adult life, cried empty the fountains of her wrath and her terror. CHAPTER XI. Consistent in his theories of self-discipline, Ned took lodgings in a poor quarter of Paris with the widow Gamelle. Madame, a fruiterer in a small way of business, owned a little shop of semi-circular frontage that, standing like a river promontory at the north-west corner of the Rue Beautreillis--where that tributary ditch of humanity ran into and fed the muddy channel of the Rue St Antoine--seemed to have rounded from sharper outline in the age-long wash of traffic wheeling by its walls. From his window on the second floor the Englishman thus commanded a view of two streets, and, indeed, of three; for across the main thoroughfare the Rue Beautreillis, become now the Rue Royale, was continued until it discharged itself into a great house-enclosed _place_, as into a mighty reservoir of decorum built for the defecation of neighbouring vulgarities. Looking east, moreover, between the belfry towers of the convents of St Marie and La Croix, Ned’s vision might reach, without strain, the very twilight mass of the Bastille; so that, as he congratulated himself, his situation was such as--barring adventitious and unprofitable luxuries--a blood prince with any imagination might have envied him.