It was then nearly eight o'clock, and the light treacherous, but despite the veil of torrential rain which intervened between him and that shuffling figure, something in the gait, the stature, the stoop of the wide, bony shoulders, appeared unpleasantly familiar. The man's head and shoulders were wrapped in a tattered piece of sacking, which he held close to his chest. His arms were bare, as were his shins, and on his feet he had a pair of sabots stuffed with straw. Midway across the street he paused, and a tearing fit of coughing seemed to render him momentarily helpless. Chauvelin's first instinct prompted him to run to the stairs and to call for assistance from Captain Boyer. Indeed, he was half-way up to the first-floor when, looking down, he saw that the man had entered the place through the wicket-door. Still coughing and spluttering, he had divested himself of his piece of sacking and was crouching down against the barrel in the centre of the room and trying to warm his hands by holding them against the glass sides of the old lantern. From where he stood, Chauvelin could see the dim outline of the man's profile, the chin ornamented with a three-days' growth of beard, the lank hair plastered above the pallid forehead, the huge bones, coated with grime, that protruded through the rags that did duty for a shirt. The sleeves of this tattered garment hung away from the arm, displaying a fiery, inflamed weal, shaped like the letter "M," that had recently been burned into the flesh with a branding iron. The sight of that mark upon the vagabond's arm caused Chauvelin to pause a moment, then to come down the stairs again. "Citizen Rateau!" he called. The man jumped as if he had been struck with a whip, tried to struggle to his feet, but collapsed on the floor, while a terrible fit of coughing took his breath away. Chauvelin, standing beside the barrel, looked down with a grim smile on this miserable wreckage of humanity whom he had so judiciously put out of the way of further mischief. The dim flicker of the lantern illumined the gaunt, bony arm, so that the charred flesh stood out like a crimson, fiery string against à coating of grime. Rateau appeared terrified, scared by the sudden apparition of the man who had inflicted the shameful punishment upon him. Chauvelin's face, lighted from below by the lantern, did indeed appear grim and forbidding. Some few seconds elapsed before the coalheaver had recovered sufficiently to stand on his feet. "I seem to have scared you, my friend," Chauvelin remarked dryly. "I--I did not know," Rateau stammered with a painful wheeze, "that any one was here . . . I came for shelter. . . ." "I am here for shelter, too," Chauvelin rejoined, "and did not see you enter."