“No, I don’t know her. I have just made out that her two little children are in that room on the second floor which the flames are just going to reach--they have caught the staircase already; the fire brigade has been sent for, but by the time they come the children will have been smothered by the smoke. Oh! wouldn’t it be possible to get up to the balcony by climbing that wall--look!--and helping oneself up by that waterpipe? Some of these people say that thieves did it a little while ago--thieves did it to steal money, but no one dares do it to save two children. I’ve offered my purse, but it’s no good. Oh! if only I were a man!” Lafcadio listened no longer. Dropping his stick and hat at the young lady’s feet, he darted forward. With a bound he caught hold of the top of the wall unaided; a pull of his arms raised him on to it; in a moment he was standing upright and walking along the narrow edge, regardless of the broken pieces of glass with which it bristled. But the amazement of the crowd redoubled when, seizing hold of the vertical pipe, he swarmed up it, hardly resting his feet here and there for a second on the clamps which fixed it to the wall. There he is--at the balcony now--now he has vaulted the railings; the admiring crowd no longer trembles--it can only admire, for, indeed, he moves with consummate ease. One push of his shoulder shivers the window-pane; he has disappeared into the room. Agonising moment of unspeakable suspense! Here he comes again, holding a crying infant in his arms. Out of a sheet torn in two and knotted together end to end, he hastily contrives a rope--ties the child to it--lowers it gently to the arms of the distracted mother. The second child is saved in the same way. When Lafcadio came down in his turn, the crowd cheered him as a hero. “They take me for a clown,” thought he, as he roughly and ungraciously repulsed their greetings, exasperated at feeling himself blush. But when the young lady, whom he again approached, shyly held out to him his hat and stick and with them the purse she had promised, he took it with a smile, emptied it of the sixty francs that it contained, and gave the money to the poor mother, who was smothering her children with kisses. “May I keep the purse in remembrance of you, Mademoiselle?” He kissed the little embroidered purse. The two looked at each other for a moment. The young girl was agitated and paler than ever; she seemed desirous of speaking, but Lafcadio abruptly turned on his heel and opened a way through the crowd with his stick. His air was so forbidding that they very soon stopped cheering and following him. * * * * * He regained the Luxembourg, made a hasty meal at the restaurant Gambrinus near the Odéon and returned swiftly to his room. There under a board in the floor he kept his store of money; three twenty-franc pieces and one ten-franc piece were extracted from their hiding-place. He reckoned: