“Oh! you may talk out loud,” wheezed the stalwart dame.  “The poor gentleman is dead. . . .  He has just gone.”

A shrill cry broke from Schmucke.  He felt Pons’ cold hand stiffening in his, and sat staring into his friend’s eyes; the look in them would have driven him mad, if Mme. Sauvage, doubtless accustomed to scenes of this sort, had not come to the bedside with a mirror which she held over the lips of the dead.  When she saw that there was no mist upon the surface, she briskly snatched Schmucke’s hand away.

“Just take away your hand, sir; you may not be able to do it in a little while.  You do not know how the bones harden.  A corpse grows cold very quickly.  If you do not lay out a body while it is warm, you have to break the joints later on. . . .”

And so it was this terrible woman who closed the poor dead musician’s eyes.

With a business-like dexterity acquired in ten years of experience, she stripped and straightened the body, laid the arms by the sides, and covered the face with the bedclothes, exactly as a shopman wraps a parcel.

“A sheet will be wanted to lay him out.—­Where is there a sheet?” she demanded, turning on the terror-stricken Schmucke.

He had watched the religious ritual with its deep reverence for the creature made for such high destinies in heaven; and now he saw his dead friend treated simply as a thing in this packing process—­saw with the sharp pain that dissolves the very elements of thought.

“Do as you vill——­” he answered mechanically.  The innocent creature for the first time in his life had seen a man die, and that man was Pons, his only friend, the one human being who understood him and loved him.

“I will go and ask Mme. Cibot where the sheets are kept,” said La Sauvage.

“A truckle-bed will be wanted for the person to sleep upon,” Mme. Cantinet came to tell Schmucke.

Schmucke nodded and broke out into weeping.  Mme. Cantinet left the unhappy man in peace; but an hour later she came back to say: 

“Have you any money, sir, to pay for the things?”

The look that Schmucke gave Mme. Cantinet would have disarmed the fiercest hate; it was the white, blank, peaked face of death that he turned upon her, as an explanation that met everything.

“Dake it all and leaf me to mein prayers and tears,” he said, and knelt.

Mme. Sauvage went to Fraisier with the news of Pons’ death.  Fraisier took a cab and went to the Presidente.  To-morrow she must give him the power of attorney to enable him to act for the heirs.

Another hour went by, and Mme. Cantinet came again to Schmucke.

“I have been to Mme. Cibot, sir, who knows all about things here,” she said.  “I asked her to tell me where everything is kept.  But she almost jawed me to death with her abuse. . . .  Sir, do listen to me. . . .”