“You are right.  We ought to be weeping because you didn’t break it.  Come, man, get up,” and he held out a hand to the prostrate rogue.

Scaramouche took the hand, clutched it, heaved himself from the ground, then with a scream dropped back again.

“My foot!” he complained.

Binet rolled through the group of players, scattering them to right and left.  Apprehension had been quick to seize him.  Fate had played him such tricks before.

“What ails your foot?” quoth he, sourly.

“It’s broken, I think,” Scaramouche complained.

“Broken?  Bah!  Get up, man.”  He caught him under the armpits and hauled him up.

Scaramouche came howling to one foot; the other doubled under him when he attempted to set it down, and he must have collapsed again but that Binet supported him.  He filled the place with his plaint, whilst Binet swore amazingly and variedly.

“Must you bellow like a calf, you fool?  Be quiet.  A chair here, some one.”

A chair was thrust forward.  He crushed Scaramouche down into it.

“Let us look at this foot of yours.”

Heedless of Scaramouche’s howls of pain, he swept away shoe and stocking.

“What ails it?” he asked, staring.  “Nothing that I can see.”  He seized it, heel in one hand, instep in the other, and gyrated it.  Scaramouche screamed in agony, until Climene caught Binet’s arm and made him stop.

“My God, have you no feelings?” she reproved her father.  “The lad has hurt his foot.  Must you torture him?  Will that cure it?”

“Hurt his foot!” said Binet.  “I can see nothing the matter with his foot — nothing to justify all this uproar.  He has bruised it, maybe... "

“A man with a bruised foot doesn’t scream like that,” said Madame over Climene’s shoulder.  “Perhaps he has dislocated it.”

“That is what I fear,” whimpered Scaramouche.

Binet heaved himself up in disgust.

“Take him to bed,” he bade them, “and fetch a doctor to see him.”

It was done, and the doctor came.  Having seen the patient, he reported that nothing very serious had happened, but that in falling he had evidently sprained his foot a little.  A few days’ rest and all would be well.

“A few days!” cried Binet.  “God of God!  Do you mean that he can’t walk?”

“It would be unwise, indeed impossible for more than a few steps.”

M. Binet paid the doctor’s fee, and sat down to think.  He filled himself a glass of Burgundy, tossed it off without a word, and sat thereafter staring into the empty glass.

“It is of course the sort of thing that must always be happening to me,” he grumbled to no one in particular.  The members of the company were all standing in silence before him, sharing his dismay.  “I might have known that this — or something like it — would occur to spoil the first vein of luck that I have found in years.  Ah, well, it is finished.  To-morrow we pack and depart.  The best day of the fair, on the crest of the wave of our success — a good fifteen louis to be taken, and this happens!  God of God!”