For the Crapeau Honor

by Anna Alice Chapin

For the
Crapeau Honor

by Anna Alice Chapin

Author of “Stinging Butterflies,” “Reuben Carstair's Journey,” etc.

 

THE little French quarter in the big American town looked flooded with pale-gold April sunshine, as quiet and reposeful as any remote Provençal village, until progress and civilization, in the shape of a noisy motor car, made their appearance. A second and rather noisier machine, representing further progress and civilization, then rushed into the bright, peaceful little street.

There were shouts of warning, many strange and indignant sounds from the two cars themselves—such recrimination and vituperation as might be expected from the repellent monsters—scintillating clouds of dust, a piercing smell of gasoline, then a raucous, grinding noise.

The two machines had collided, though not at full speed, and one at least was badly crippled from its experience. The small street, or rather square, was instantly filled to overflowing with excited, gesticulating, more or less Latin humanity. Like a sea made up of choppy, but none the less violent waves, the denizens of the French quarter inundated the two machines, figuratively, actually and conversationally—oh, but very much conversationally!

All the quaint, decent little shops opened their doors with a jack-in-the-box celerity, and all the quaint, decent little proprietors thereof shot out to make inquiries, with the most vivid interest and sympathy conceivable. “Oh, la, la, la!—Something of damage?—An accident, eh?—Has any one been hurt?—Oh, la, la, la!”

In the French quarter were all manner of minute stores, or boutiques, where one could buy microscopic quantities of almost every commodity from handmade embroidery to homemade cream cheese, from stationery to boot laces. When the eventual, though tardy policeman shouldered his way into the crowd, he was deafened with offers of assistance from all sides. It seemed, in effect, that a monsieur in one of the automobiles had been injured—though so slightly that he, the courageous one, would make nothing of it! Regard then the blood which trickled down his cheek! He had been thrown, one perceived, against the door of his motor car! What misfortune!

The somewhat shaken victim firmly declined help at first, though courteously enough, and, indeed, seemed completely in command of the situation. He stood there, upright, well dressed, Russia leather bag in hand, confronting the occupant of the car which had run him down, and straightway the breeze of Gallic interest began, with highly characteristic mobility, to veer toward the hopeful expectation of a scrap!

But behold! This was something even more affecting, if less dramatic. It would appear that they knew each other, the two messieurs? They clasped hands; there were apologies, references to a future meeting. At last the offending machine went off the scene, taking in tow its late worsted adversary.

The man with the leather bag and apparently broken head remained. It was increasingly obvious that he must rest somewhere for a few minutes, if only to bathe his wounded forehead. A hesitating murmur again arose, hesitating only while the gentleman was showing the policeman his card.

“Metropole Bank!” said the officer of the law, with instant and evident respect. “You're not wise, sir, to be going through this precinct, if you have money on you. Not,” he hastened to add, “that the people living right hereabouts aren't honest and respectable enough; but there's a gang of young thugs and pickpockets that operates in the neighborhood, and you never know what they'll be at.”

“Young?” repeated the man from the Metropole Bank.

“Yes, sir, and worse than they could possibly be if they were a mite older! 'Tis strange,” he added philosophically, “how, when children in their 'teens' take to wrong ways, they go the limit and think of more things bad to do than any grown-up could; I expect 'tis the baby imagination of 'em still workin'!”

Meanwhile the murmur of first-aid offers had grown to a musically staccato chorus which was not only anxious but insistent:

“But I—I—Meester Policeman—Claude Morin—I am the one! Look if my shop is not neat, and the good wife knows more of surgery than——”

“See, monsieur l'officer, the gentleman can rest a little in the room back of the shop of me, Marie Gervaise, on the very bed where my revered great-grandomther died!”

Nevertheless, there was an instant and unanimous withdrawal, most deferentially indicated, of all and any competition, when the door of the very tiniest shop in the city gently opened.

It disclosed a fragile little old Frenchwoman, wearing threadbare black, an old-fashioned cap, and a hair brooch, who proffered solicitously:

“If the wounded gentleman would but care to rest in my poor house——”

A general whisper of acquiescence made itself heard: “But surely, surely it is Madame Crapeau who is best fitted of all!”

The officer put in his word: “She's a good old soul, sir, Mother Crapeau—clean and honest, though poor as the first church mouse, sir, I do believe!”

But the man with the Russia leather bag, and the thin trickle of blood on his rather white cheek, had already sized up Mother Crapeau—her gentleness, her candor, her native peasant dignity. It was an essential part of his business to be able to do so.

“Thanks; I shall be very grateful,” he said, and forthwith made his way into the wee shop where Madame Crapeau sold a little bit of everything; such as ink, crocheted lace, and such marvelous preserves as the French alone can make from nothing but fruit parings.

Oh, but it was clean, this Crapeau boutique, and madame herself a spotless vessel of most delicate porcelain; or, better, of some infinitely charming rustic pottery. Thin and brown and purely wrinkled were madame's cheeks; finely but firmly penciled her brows; dark, soft and yet penetrating her eyes.

In the shabby, immaculate little store she placed a chair for her guest, and brought a small hand basin of water, with a snowy bit of old linen, with which to bathe the blood from his forehead and face.

“But monsieur is exhausted!” she exclaimed, with the most attractive of French accents. “A Little restorative—some cognac—or to lie down——”

“Frankly, madame,” her patient said, with a plucky smile, though his cheeks grew whiter every moment, “I can only afford a minute to rest, and then must go on. The gentleman who so unhappily ran me down is sending a taxi.” He looked searchingly into the clear dark eyes of the little old woman who ministered to him so solicitously, and was satisfied. “I am a bank messenger, madame,” he finished.

The word bank brought awe into “Mother” Crapeau's kind eyes, but its conjunction with the word messenger plainly perplexed her. “Messenger?” she repeated.

He explained.

“My name is Giles Courlay, madame, and it is my privilege to be trusted with large sums of the Metropole Bank's money from time to time. I have in this bag many thousands of dollars.”

Round were the eyes of Madame Crapeau. Like all her race, she had a real reverence for money, for what it represents, what it will bring, its immense importance in this world. In her heart of hearts, madame suspected that it would count somewhat in the next also; else why was there so much stress upon the streets paved with gold? “Thousands! Mon-sieur!” she breathed in her delightful old voice, with its ineradicable French inflexions.

Giles Courlay could not help smiling at her awed attitude, though he knew it to be racially characteristic, and knew, too, that it came from wholesome thrift, not avarice.

“You live here alone, madame?” he said, interested in the old woman in spite of his weakness.

“I have two grandchildren, monsieur, who are out at present. They are very beautiful, and go to mass every Sunday.”

“That must be a great comfort to you. And your business—that goes well?”

A faint color of embarrassment tinted the deep ivory of madame's cheek. “Not always, monsieur,” she answered, “That could not be expected. So small a business, monsieur, and the times so difficult!”

“Just now, for instance?”

“Just now—not so well as sometimes,” Madame Crapeau admitted, more flushed, with head erect.

“You have been so exceedingly kind, madame, that perhaps I might——” He stopped short at the flame in the eyes of his hostess.

“Monsieur!” she exclaimed, indescribably affronted. “The house of Crapeau is poor, but it is honorable. We do not accept alms, nor payment for our hospitality!”

He could only murmur an apology. She accepted it with true peasant dignity.

The next moment he reeled in his chair, and would have fallen save for the swift and unexpectedly strong support of his hostess. This time she insisted upon his retiring to the bedroom off the shop, where the four-poster, with its ancient curtains, recalled to Giles Courlay's half-fainting brain sundry trips through the south of France. This time she insisted upon her prescription of a little cognac, and waited anxiously to see the bank messenger's eyelids lift. They did so at last, but languidly.

“I'm afraid I must rest a bit,” he acknowledged.

“A doctor, monsieur?”

“No, no! It is not serious—a mere weakness. I will lie here until my friend sends the machine.” He smiled weakly and settled back upon the large square white pillow, which was softer than it looked, just as Mother Crapeau was stronger than she looked. Suddenly he roused himself and looked gravely into her honest eyes.

“Madame—my bag of money. You will guard it?”

“With my life, monsieur; on the honor of Thérèse Crapeau! The Crapeau honor will always be preserved!”

Though theatrical, it was genuine, and Courlay let himself relax entirely, while she spread over him a wonderful hand-sewn quilt and lowered the window shades softly.

Back in her shop she looked at the Russia leather bag with wondering and wistful eyes. Knowing it to be a sin, she nevertheless could not help her gnarled little brown fingers from touching the latch. She longed to see so much money just once; she who had never seen even the tenth of enough, But she thrust the shameless temptation by, and put the bag behind her narrow counter for safe-keeping.

The next moment her shop door creaked and opened, admitting two of the most ill-looking young people imaginable. They were Célestine and Ambrose, madame's grandchildren; and when she beheld their swarthy, shifty-eyed visages, she exclaimed in the French to which she always reverted when deeply moved:

“My adored ones! My beautifuls!”

“Talk English, 'Gran,'” Ambrose broke in impatiently. “Say, is it true—what they're saying in the street?”

Célestine continued the thought.

“That a grand, rich gentleman came in here?”

Madame nodded with some pride. “He is a bank messenger, and a very fine monsieur indeed! He is resting in the back room now.”

Suddenly she checked her outburst of innocent boasting at sight of their faces. Cupidity stared out of their small black eyes as out of a rat's at the smell of cheese. They were remarkably alike; though Célestine was seventeen and Ambrose not yet fifteen, they might almost have been twins.

Under his breath Ambrose swore an oath that was more than twice his inconsiderable size.

Madame Crapeau looked, as she felt, frightened. “My beloved one,” she entreated faintly. “what is it?”

“A bank messenger—here in the house—asleep in the next room! Why——” The boy stopped for sheer excess of emotion.

But his sister took up the refrain in a cautious voice, which worried their poor grandmother because of what it implied.

“And the rent two months due. Why, it is the chance of a lifetime! He must have lots and lots of money with him. They carry it in bags.”

“How much is it, Gran?” muttered Ambrose with a wary glance at the closed door of the bedroom.

“How—how should I know, my little one?” she faltered.

“Didn't you even look in the bag?” whispered Célestine incredulously. “Where is it, Gran?” The affrighted hesitation in her grandmother's face made her wicked young instincts jump to the truth. “Gran, you're keeping it for him somewhere!”

Like two little vultures they pressed closer upon her, and involuntarily she guarded the open space that led behind the counter where she had placed the bag.

With a carefully subdued whoop of triumph, Ambrose started to scramble over the narrow strip of woodwork which kept him from the object of his predatory desires. But something else kept him. Mother Crapeau, with that extraordinarily strong little grip of hers, had seized him by the arm.

“Stop!” she said sternly. “Have you no shame at all, no sense of the Crapeau honor?”

“With a bank messenger's bag, we should worry about the Crapeau honor; eh, 'Cel?' ” he jeered.

The girl, a clear throwback to the Paris apache type, laughed. Nevertheless, there was something about their grandmother at that moment which held them back a space.

“My children,” she said quietly, “listen to me, who am old and have always upheld the Crapeau honor, though I had not the privilege of being born of such noble stock. Your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, all of the Crapeau family have been above reproach. Of your mother, my daughter-in-law, I will say nothing. She was born in Paris, and I have never understood girls who have lived much in the city. Anyway, she is dead, and I hope God comprehends her better than I did. As to my own blood”—she paused, and went on with a resolute effort—“it has been very humble always. There have been criminals in the family from time to time. One was executed for murder, two have been in jail. But God knows I have tried to live down that terrible record. He alone knows how I have prayed that you two, my dear ones, be spared the taint of dishonesty!”

“And nothing doing, eh?” rejoined Ambrose flippantly. “You'll never get us to see the charm of the straight and narrow; will she, Cel?”

“Oh, my children, how can you break my heart like this? Not once, but four, five times have I had to cover some crooked work of yours! Not even the neighbors suspect that you were in a reform school, Ambrose. No policeman or detective ever dreamed, Célestine, that it was here that you brought your shoplifting gains! I hated to have the stuff in the house even for the little time it was here, and you know well that never would I touch a penny of stolen money. And now! That you should suggest robbing a stranger who trusts me—under my own roof——” Her withered lips trembled.

“Well,” said her grandson, though just a bit sheepishly, “by your own showing we come by it honestly!”

“Don't you mean dishonestly?” put in sharp-faced little Célestine, with a giggle.

“The honor of the house of Crapeau——”

The creak of the shop door made them all pause and turn. A stout, hard-eyed man came in with a book and sheaf of blanks in his fat red hands. Madame gasped at sight of him.

“Well,” he greeted her, with a sardonic grin, “is it the same old story? Your rent's three months overdue, and we've let it run on like this because the boss says you're a decent old creature and should be given a chance. but it stops right now. Do I get the three months rent, or do you camp on the sidewalk to-morrow? Think quick, and, if possible, answer quicker!”

“But, monsieur, I have not the money,” Madame Crapeau made tremulous answer. “Just to live—it costs so much——”

The boy Ambrose sprang forward. “Don't you believe her, sir!” he said. “She can get the money any time she likes!”

The collector looked from one to the other. “That so, eh?” he remarked. “Well, I never knew a Frenchy yet that wasn't a miser at heart. I'll give you till noon to-morrow to get that money, old lady. If you haven't been able to dig it up then, out you go. Right in full view of the neighbors, too!” he added, with the sourness of tone that can only be developed by years of rent collecting.

After which, he departed.

Poor Mother Crapeau flung up her hands in anguish. To be evicted at last, after her long and honorable years in the quarter! To be turned out of her little shop and home! Where now would be the Crapeau honor?

Upon her dazed and horror-stricken reflections swooped her two reptilian young relatives.

“Now, Gran—now, Gran—how about that old family honor of yours? Going to see us put out in broad daylight, when you've the money right at your hand?”

The old woman closed her eyes and prayed that the automobile might come quickly. In her utter simplicity she prayed half aloud:

“Oh, good Lord, bring the automobile quickly, very quickly indeed!”

“What's that?” asked Ambrose excitedly. “A car coming for him? We can soon fix that! Tim Sogarty will pretend to be drunk—if he isn't already!—and can create enough disturbance to delay a car from entering this street from one end, and Danny Rose will do the same at the other. They won't mind being arrested, for a century apiece! We'll fix it! Or rather,” he added, with precocious shrewdness, “I'll fix it. You better stand guard at the door, Cel; I wouldn't trust her not to warn him and get him away. Say, it's some luck that the cop has beat it!”

He vanished with an expert noiselessness which almost eliminated the creak from the old wooden door.

“Oh, Célestine,” moaned Madame Crapeau, “are you, too, willing to do this thing?”

“Me?” ejaculated the girl, with glittering eyes under her scarlet tam-o'-shanter and untidy black hair. “I'm so willing that I'm going to take my bit now before the gang gets here! Amby'll have 'em here in force in fifteen minutes. Give me that bag, Gran, or—or—I'll take it!”

“Non—non!”

There was a brief struggle, in which the bag flew open and bundles of bills, green and yellow, with white circlets, went right and left. The girl gave a subdued shriek of greed at sight of them.

“Célestine—the honor of your father——”

“Guess I must take after my mother! Glory, but that looks good to me! I'll take enough to have some real clothes for once in my life!”

“No, Célestine!”

“No good, Gran. You're only young once, and what's the' good of being young without money? Anyhow, your own family was dishonest, so you needn't say anything!”

“You shall not—you shall not!”

Célestine bent, hawklike, for the nearest bundle of bills, reached it, and had torn one free, when the door creaked loudly and she was forced to straighten up, her vicious, dark little face inexpressibly sullen with disappointment. The money, she thrust angrily into the front of her dirty blouse.

The newcomer was a neighbor and customer, Marie Gervaise, broad, brick-red, and polished of countenance, who had come to buy a spool of thread and to gossip a bit.

“Good day, neighbor!”

“Good day, Marie Gervaise!”

Having greeted her, madame, flushed and trembling, stooped to stuff the money back into the bag, sheltered by the counter. She blessed the advent of the good Marie Gervaise, but she knew well that the danger of further depredations was by no means over yet.

Célestine, with a sulky, threatening look, walked to the door, which was now half open, and looked out. “And so, Mère Crapeau, you have the invalid stranger here? What an event!” went on neighbor Gervaise, prepared to be voluble.

“A great event, my dear Marie Gervaise,” said madame in a very low tone. “Now, will you just excuse me for one moment?”

“But naturally!”

Mother Crapeau cast an anxious glance at her granddaughter's meager back, outlined in the doorway, then picked up the Russia leather bag and carried it without the ghost of a sound into the bedroom.

Courlay, it appeared, slumbered—the sleep of weakness and reaction from shock. But madame roused him with a firm, light hand upon his shoulder.

“Monsieur—monsieur,” she whispered, “you must wake. Il le faut. You must!”

He started up, half bewildered at first, then smiled, recognizing her.

“I'm fit enough now,” he said. “Is the car here?'

She shook her head, and laid her finger upon her lip.

“Follow me, monsieur, and make no noise.”

Mystified, but as confident of her as though he had known her all his life, Giles Courlay obeyed. His judgment of character had very seldom been at fault during a life of wide and varied responsibilities. He knew he could trust to it at least twice as often as most men can safely trust to what they call their sense of precaution. He went with Madame Crapeau blindly, and she, still carrying his bag, led the way from the room where he had rested, to a second, darker bedchamber opening from the first. There was but one window, closed tightly, of course. This madame opened, exerting all her strength, disclosing an unattractive back yard which ended in a broken-down wooden paling, and beyond, the street.

“It is your only way, monsieur,” she murmured anxiously. “Go—go quickly, while there is yet time!”

He obeyed without a word, and when he had climbed out of the window, she handed his bag down to him.

“God keep you, monsieur!”

“My thanks, madame, for—all. Of course I don't quite understand why——”

“It—it is a matter of the Crapeau honor, monsieur,” madame said, in a queer, shaking voice. He never altogether forgot it, nor the look in her troubled old eyes.

A minute later he was gone and out of danger, and madame, suddenly and most wonderfully steady, went back to her shop.

“I am sorry, my good Marie, to have kept you waiting,' she said softly. “And now I must ask a favor of you. Will you post a letter for me as you go out?”

“But naturally! Shall I pick out my own thread, Mère Crapeau? The threads seem all in this little tray here.”

“But certainly, pick it out yourself.”

She uncorked an inkstand, took paper and envelope from her stationery shelf, and grasped the pen she used to keep her accounts; then, in her spidery French handwriting, wrote and addressed a letter to “Metropole Bank.” Her hand did not tremble, and her manner was calmness itself, though Ceélestine had turned back from the door and was regarding her suspiciously.

This is madame's letter, a letter which Giles Courlay remembered as long as he lived:

Messreurs: I have stolen your money. I repent. I wait arrest.

Therese Crapeau.

“And your invalid?” the neighbor asked inquisitively. “He does well here, eh?” She took the addressed envelope, and thrust it into her old-style, capacious pocket.

“Very well,” answered Madame Crapeau quietly. “He sleeps. Celestine, do you see any sign of an automobile?”

That brought Marie Gervaise, all curiosity, to the door. Once there, she caught sight of an acquaintance, and, waving a hasty adieu to the Crapeau ménage, drifted across the street for further fragmentary gossip.

Célestine closed the door after her with a bang, and bolted it against more interruptions. Then she ran to the counter and writhed across it like a lithe young snake. And then she turned upon her grandmother, gray with fury.

“It's gone—the bag's gone!” she gasped, almost incoherently. “Gran, what have you done with it? Oh, no matter! Amby'll be here any moment now, and they'll finish this business! But to think of cheating me, you mean old thing; cheating me out of my own bit! I'm lucky to have got any of it at all! I—I'll go back to shoplifting to-morrow!”

“Oh, child, will nothing keep you from it?” madame pleaded most piteously. “You cannot always escape, my beautiful dear, and—and I—I do not wish to see my little ones arrested—both for love of them, and because of the family honor.”

“The family honor!”

“And I want to tell you, Célestine,” madame went on in even tones, “the gentleman—has gone.”

“The gentleman: The bank messenger?”

“He is gone. He trusted me, and he will think I stole the money. I suppose I shall be arrested very soon now.”

“Gone! Amby'll die!”

Célestine rushed out of the shop, whether to cache her haul or to warn Amby that their prospective victim had eluded them, her grandmother did not know. She did not much care, any longer. She had saved Courlay from being robbed by a gang of youthful but pernicious criminals which she knew only too well. She had let him think that she had betrayed his confidence. She had saved her children from being arrested, and, in her old age, she was going to jail. The shop would be closed to-morrow. It made, altogether, quite enough to think about. So she sat down in the neat little store and thought, while waiting for the law to come and take her.

Meanwhile, Courlay was counting the money in the leather bag, more out of habit than because of the faintest suspicion. When he found that a hundred-dollar bill was missing, he was stupefied, outraged, and genuinely disappointed.

“I must be losing my intuitions about people!” he muttered to himself. “Of course she took it; yet I would have banked on the honesty of that old woman to my last dollar. She and her Crapeau honor! Of all the frauds!”

A sudden vision rose up before him of her finely wrinkled, pure old face, and the candid dark eyes. He hesitated in perplexity, and then decided to go to the shop and have it out with her.

He did not, though, after all. For almost as strange things happen in this world as we are led to expect will occur in the next.

When he went back to the tiny square, now all checkered with orange and purple and blue, like the colors of a Continental afternoon, he encountered just such a queer, theatrical scene as might have been enacted on the stage of a pantomime tragique. It was a rather smaller group of lookers-on than that which had honored his first clamorous entrance, and they were all of them quite quiet and rather sad. Some women were wiping their eyes, and he heard: “La pauvre madame!—Poor, good Mère Crapeau!” on every side.

In the center of the group were two policeman, one of whom he had talked with earlier, and two young creatures that recalled his remote adventurous days in Montmartre. The last time he had seen that type—where was it? Why, it was at the Moulin Rouge, that justly immortal Red Mill which once ground vulgar curiosity to golden powder. Rats both, slim, dark and vicious of appearance, they presented a sight at once tragic, revolting and grotesque, and the man's blood curdled with distaste at the very look of them.

Only tragic, though, was the picture framed in the duskiness of the Crapeau boutique. Madame, ashen with shame and despair, stood there—little, aged, with eyes glazed with a suffering she was too proud to express.

“Mes petits anges—my little angels!” she muttered through her set teeth, but no one heard the words. There was no need to hear them; her face was too terribly enough.

At sight of Courlay, she staggered back with a noiseless cry, and almost fell.

“Monsieur!” she gasped. “I wrote you——”

“About what, Madame Crapeau?” asked the man quietly. “About the money you stole from me?”

There was an outburst of honest indignation and resentment from the little crowd, which to his imagination had taken on the fantastic air of an opera chorus:

“Monsieur!—But never!—Jamais de la vie! She could not, monsieur; she would not steal a pin!—Non, non, non, non, non!”

The patrolman he knew addressed him somewhat reproachfully:

“She never done it, sir! It's surprised I am that you should think it of her. Here's your money, sir—at least, I guess it's yours—but it was these little demons that took it!”

He handed over a greenback, which Courlay mechanically glanced at and almost as mechanically pocketed.

“I—I am to blame, monsieur,” persisted Madame Crapeau hoarsely. “I have—written—you a letter—confessing——”

“Nothing doing!” and “we wouldn't take your own word against yourself, madame!” the officers reassured her.

Meanwhile they kept tight hold of their two prizes, who looked like moth-eaten little black cats, with the infernal regions spitting fire out of their narrow eyes.

“I have implored the—the officers—to arrest me!” panted the little Frenchwoman, through colorless lips. “My children—they have never been arrested—never—never! And the Crapeau blood—so pure, so honorable! If it had been me who”—her breath was coming in labored gusts now—“was arrested—it would have been—so much better! Me—I was not born a Crapeau. But they—my dears—my beautifuls! Oh, monsieur, you from the bank—will you not make them arrest me?”

“Not on a bet, ma'am!” spoke up one of the officers. “You go and lie down and rest. We'll take care of these precious pets of yours. Say, sir did you ever see such a couple o' mugs? But we're blamed sorry for you, madame, just the same!”

“Arrest to-day! to-morrow, eviction! It is the end of the Crapeaux!” whispered madame, trembling a little.

And again the little scene took on the look of unreality, of melodrama, of that odd, bizarre mingling of the tragic and the comic which belongs best to the stage of the smaller French theaters.

For the rent collector, who was still in the street, raking it for possible and impossible payments, now made a stolid, but effective, entrance.

“That'll be all right!” he announced gruffly. “I guess the boss will wait a while longer.”

He trudged away, feeling queerly ashamed of the knowledge that his unprepossessing head was wearing a halo at that moment—to one woman's eyes, at least.

Among the now quickly deepening shadows, the crowd melted silently away; so did the policemen with Célestine and Ambrose Crapeau. Giles Courlay remained, and madame.

Slowly, almost shyly, he went up to her; then, with a quicker step, reached her side in time to prevent her from falling.

“Madame, let me help you,” he said, supporting her to a chair. “You are worn out with too much strain. I am very, very sorry.”

His own eyes were mistier than they had been in many years; but madame's were dry and anguished.

“Monsieur,” she said with a moan, “the Crapeau honor has——”

The man bent and kissed her brown old hand.

“I wouldn't worry about that,” he said, with a great gentleness. “The Crapeau honor—has been preserved.”