He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion.  But he could only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and sunk deeply in.  With a single white in his pocket, all his projects for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away.  And it was not only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; positive discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch.  His perspiration had dried upon him; and although the wind had now fallen, a binding frost was setting in stronger with every hour, and he felt benumbed and sick at heart.  What was to be done?  Late as was the hour, improbable as was his success, he would try the house of his adopted father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.

He ran all the way, and knocked timidly.  There was no answer.  He knocked again and again, taking heart with every stroke; and at last steps were heard approaching from within.  A barred wicket fell open in the iron-studded door, and emitted a gush of yellow light.

“Hold up your face to the wicket,” said the chaplain from within.

“It’s only me,” whimpered Villon.

“Oh, it’s only you, is it?” returned the chaplain; and he cursed him with foul, unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour, and bade him be off to hell, where he came from.

“My hands are blue to the wrist,” pleaded Villon; “my feet are dead and full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold lies at my heart.  I may be dead before morning.  Only this once, father, and, before God, I will never ask again!”

“You should have come earlier,” said the ecclesiastic, coolly.  “Young men require a lesson now and then.”  He shut the wicket and retired deliberately into the interior of the house.

Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.

“Wormy old fox!” he cried.  “If I had my hand under your twist, I would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit.”

A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long passages.  He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath.  And then the humour of the situation struck him, and he laughed and looked lightly up to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking over his discomfiture.

What was to be done?  It looked very like a night in the frosty streets.  The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination, and gave him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early night might very well happen to him before morning.  And he so young!  And with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement before him!  He felt quite pathetic over the notion of his own fate, as if it had been some one else’s, and made a little imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning when they should find his body.

He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between his thumb and forefinger.  Unfortunately he was on bad terms with some old friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a plight.  He had lampooned them in verses; he had beaten and cheated them; and yet now, when he was in so close a pinch, he thought there was at least one who might perhaps relent.  It was a chance.  It was worth trying at least, and he would go and see.