As she spoke she hastily smeared the blood over the child's face and dragged him away from the priest, who had stepped forward.     

       “No, no,” he protested. “Those times are past.”       

       “Past!” said the woman, with a flash of fury. “All the country knows that your own mother did it to you at Sartene, where you come from.”       

       The abbé made no answer, but, taking the child by the arm, dragged him gently away from his mother. With his other hand he sought in his pocket for a handkerchief. But he was a lone man, without a housekeeper, and the handkerchief was missing. The child looked from one to the other, laughing uncertainly, with his grimly decorated face.     

       Then the priest stooped, and with the skirt of his cassock wiped the child's face.     

       “There,” he said to the woman, “take him home, for I hear the gendarmes coming.”       

       Indeed, the trotting of horses and the clank of the long swinging sabres could be heard on the road below the village, and one by one the onlookers       dropped away, leaving the Abbé Susini alone at the foot of the church steps.     

  

  

       CHAPTER II. CHEZ CLÉMENT.     

      “Comme on est heureux quand on sait ce qu'on veut!”   

       It was the dinner hour at the Hotel Clément at Bastia; and the event was of greater importance than the outward appearance of the house would seem to promise. For there is no promise at all about the house on the left-hand side of Bastia's one street, the Boulevard du Palais, which bears, as its only sign, a battered lamp with the word “Clément” printed across it. The ground floor is merely a rope and hemp warehouse. A small Corsican donkey, no bigger than a Newfoundland dog, lives in the basement, and passes many of his waking hours in what may be termed the entrance hall of the hotel, appearing to consider himself in some sort a 

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