firearms in the lot. This pistol—oh, a weapon fit for a prince!—it shall be only forty francs to you, friend Mignot—if I lose ten by the sale. But perhaps an arquebuse———”
“This will do,” said David, throwing the money on the counter. ‘‘Is it charged?”
“I will charge it,” said Zeigler. ‘‘And, for ten francs more, add a store of powder and ball.”
David laid his pistol under his coat and walked to his cottage. Yvonne was not there. Of late she had taken to gadding much among the neighbours. But a fire was glowing in the kitchen stove. David opened the door of it and thrust his poems in upon the coals. As they blazed up they made a singing, harsh sound in the flue.
“The song of the crow!” said the poet.
He went up to his attic room and closed the door. So quiet was the village that a score of people heard the roar of the great pistol. They flocked thither, and up the stairs where the the smoke, issuing, drew their notice. The men laid the body of the poet upon his bed, awkwardly arranging it to conceal the torn plumage of the poor black crow. The women chattered in a luxury of zealous pity. Some of them ran to tell Yvonne.
M. Papineau, whose nose had brought him there among the first, picked up the weapon and ran his eye over its silver mountings with a mingled air of connoisseurship and grief.
“The arms,” he explained, aside, to the curé, “and crest of Monseigneur, the Marquis de Beaupertuys,”
