saw plainly that I should never have the slightest pleasure in wearing it. I imagined it hanging at my side. You or some one else would compliment me upon it. How could I look you in the face and take your congratulations? I put my arm out of bed and laid the stolen gold-piece on the table by my bedside. It seemed to burn me. 'No,' I said, 'no, I will not keep it. I will throw it away to-morrow, or I will give it to some other beggar.' This resolution taken, I signed myself with the cross and said an Ave to confirm it. I sat up, and in the darkness I hid that accursed coin in the depths of my table drawer, and then I tried to sleep. But these distresses had given me a sort of fever. My ideas were roused; never in my life had I thought so rapidly. The talk I had heard at my uncle's surged up in my mind. The conversation on presentiments and occult influences returned to me, and with it the recollection of my Cousin Lucien. 'That,' he had said, when he showed me the gold-piece, 'look at it well; that is my fetich.' The strange impression of mystery which the word forced upon me when I first heard it now came back to me, and I reasoned upon it. By not giving that gold-piece to the first beggar, I had not only committed a theft, but I had failed in my promise to Lucien. Perhaps I had brought him ill-luck; those very words had been used, back and forth, in the conversation. I then beheld, in thought
