Comprehension lit in her face; she uttered a wretched little laugh.

“Ah, v’la de la comedie!” she cried.  “No, I haven’t got him.  They have taken him from me.  They have taken him, and in there”—­her forefinger shot out and pointed to the wall and beyond it—­“in there, in a room full of people who stare and listen, they are making him into a murderer.”

“Then—­parbleu!” The little official was seized by comprehension as by a fit.  “Then there is an artist—­the artist of whom you talk—­who is one of the apaches!  It is unbelievable!”

At the word apaches the girl turned on him with teeth bared as though in a snarl.  But at the sound of Rufin’s voice she subsided.

“What is his name—­quickly?” he demanded.

“Giaconi,” she answered.

Rufin looked his question at the little official, who turned to the girl.

“Peter the Lucky?” he queried.

She nodded dejectedly.

The little official made a grimace.  “It was he,” he said, “who did the throat-cutting.  Tiens! this begins to be a drama.”

The girl, with drooping head, made a faint moan of protest and misery.  Rufin signed the little man to be silent.  The truth, if he had but given it entertainment, had offered itself to him from the first.  All he had heard of the man, Papa Musard’s slanderous-sounding complaints of him, the fat concierge’s reports of his violence, had gathered towards this culmination.  He had insisted upon thinking of him as a full-blooded man of genius, riotously making little of conventions, a creature abounding in life, tinctured a little, perhaps, with the madness that may spice the mind of a visionary and enrage his appetites.  It was a figure ha had created to satisfy himself.

“It was false art,” he reflected.  “That is me—­false art!”

Still, whatever he had seen wrongly, there was still the picture.  Apache, murderer, and all the rest—­the fellow had painted the picture.  No one verdict can account for both art and morals, and there was reason to fear, it seemed, that the law which executed a murderer would murder a painter at the same time—­and such a painter!

“No,” said Rufin, unconsciously speaking aloud—­“no; they must not kill him.”

“Ah, M’sieur!” It was a cry from the girl, whose composure had broken utterly at his words.  “You are also an artist—­you know!”

In a hysteria of supplication she flung herself forward and was on her knees at his feet.  She lifted clasped hands and blinded eyes; she was like a child saying its prayers but for the writhen torture of her face, where wild hopes and lunatic terrors played alternately.

“M’sieur, you can save him!  You have the grand air, M’sieur; there is God in your face; you make men hear you!  For mercy—­for blessed charity—­ah, M’sieur, M’sieur, I will carry your sins for you; I will go to hell in your place!  You are great—­one sees it; and he is great, too!  M’sieur, I am your chattel, your beast—­only save him, save him!”