“You must fly, Climene!” said M. Leandre.

“Too late!” she sobbed.  “Too late!  He is here.”

“Calm, mademoiselle, calm!” the subtle friend was urging her.  “Keep calm and trust to me.  I promise you that all shall be well.”

“Oh!” cried M. Leandre, limply.  “Say what you will, my friend, this is ruin — the end of all our hopes.  Your wits will never extricate us from this.  Never!”

Through the gap strode now an enormous man with an inflamed moon face and a great nose, decently dressed after the fashion of a solid bourgeois.  There was no mistaking his anger, but the expression that it found was an amazement to Andre-Louis.

“Leandre, you’re an imbecile!  Too much phlegm, too much phlegm!  Your words wouldn’t convince a ploughboy!  Have you considered what they mean at all?  Thus,” he cried, and casting his round hat from him in a broad gesture, he took his stand at M. Leandre’s side, and repeated the very words that Leandre had lately uttered, what time the three observed him coolly and attentively.

“Oh, say what you will, my friend, this is ruin — the end of all our hopes.  Your wits will never extricate us from this.  Never!”

A frenzy of despair vibrated in his accents.  He swung again to face M. Leandre.  “Thus,” he bade him contemptuously.  “Let the passion of your hopelessness express itself in your voice.  Consider that you are not asking Scaramouche here whether he has put a patch in your breeches.  You are a despairing lover expressing... "

He checked abruptly, startled.  Andre-Louis, suddenly realizing what was afoot, and how duped he had been, had loosed his laughter.  The sound of it pealing and booming uncannily under the great roof that so immediately confined him was startling to those below.

The fat man was the first to recover, and he announced it after his own fashion in one of the ready sarcasms in which he habitually dealt.

“Hark!” he cried, “the very gods laugh at you, Leandre.”  Then he addressed the roof of the barn and its invisible tenant.  “Hi!  You there!”

Andre-Louis revealed himself by a further protrusion of his tousled head.

“Good-morning,” said he, pleasantly.  Rising now on his knees, his horizon was suddenly extended to include the broad common beyond the hedge.  He beheld there an enormous and very battered travelling chaise, a cart piled up with timbers partly visible under the sheet of oiled canvas that covered them, and a sort of house on wheels equipped with a tin chimney, from which the smoke was slowly curling.  Three heavy Flemish horses and a couple of donkeys — all of them hobbled — were contentedly cropping the grass in the neighbourhood of these vehicles.  These, had he perceived them sooner, must have given him the clue to the queer scene that had been played under his eyes.  Beyond the hedge other figures were moving.  Three at that moment came crowding into the gap — a saucy-faced girl with a tip-tilted nose, whom he supposed to be Columbine, the soubrette; a lean, active youngster, who must be the lackey Harlequin;, and another rather loutish youth who might be a zany or an apothecary.