"Friend Roger, good. It comes to my tongue easily. Let's sit, and I'll tell you who I am." And doubling his legs under him he sank cross-legged onto the floor.

"I will lean by the wall, Jean, I find it easier," said Herrick.

"Ah, there are compensations, after all, for a man like[30] me. To know Vayenne is to know me; you can't help it. They call me an innocent; you know what that means?"

[30]

"Yes."

"But not all it means, I warrant," chuckled the dwarf. "I get pity; I am not supposed to do things like other men. Who cares where I go? In the castle, in the church, in a house where there's feasting—anywhere—I don't count. Who cares if I listen? It's only Jean; in at one ear, out at the other. No one looks to me for work, they'd sooner pay me for playing the fool, and I let 'em, I let 'em." And somewhere in his strange, loose garments he made the coins jingle. "So I go in and out as I will. If I curled up to sleep on the rug at the Duke's door they'd hardly trouble to disturb me, I count for such a little. Generally I sleep in the church."

"In the church?"

"Ay; in the porch. They call me the dwarf of St. Etienne. Listen! there's its music." And he remained silent with uplifted finger until the ripple of the carillon had died away into the night. "I'm a little fellow to have so large a church to myself, as I often do at nights; and, friend Roger, I see things in St. Etienne when the moonlight sends faint, colored beams through the painted windows. There are legends and superstitions about St. Etienne, and people are superstitious about me, too. They believe I know things, and so I do, but not of the sort they fancy."

A strange little madman, Herrick thought, yet one with a method surely, as the unbarred window showed.

"An innocent, that's what they call me," the dwarf went on, as though he answered his companion's thought, "and though I am no more one than you are, it suits my[31] purpose. My wisdom would get any other man into trouble."

[31]

"That loose bar, for instance," said Herrick, pointing to the window.

"Yes; but I never thought of the use I should one day put it to. It is well to have more than one hole to creep into, and 

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