the way to the stone bench. In the distance, by the light of a lamp, he saw the little girl.
"God be praised!" he said; "she is still there."
He approached her, he took her hands.
"Oh! how cold she is, poor little one!"
He took her under the arms and raised her, so that he might carry her; her head fell back without her awaking.
"How soundly children of her age sleep!
He pressed her against his bosom to warm her, and, seized by a vague inquietude, and, with a view to rousing her out of this heavy slumber, he kissed her eyelids.
Then it was that he perceived with terror that these eyelids were half open, showing half the eyeballs—glassy, lightless, motionless. Upon his brain flashed a horrible suspicion. He placed his mouth close to that of the little girl; no breath came from it.
While with the gold piece which he had stolen from this mendicant, Lucien had won a fortune at the gaming table, the homeless child had died—died of cold!
IV.
Seized by the throat by the most frightful of agonies, Lucien tried to utter a cry, and, in the effort which he made, awoke from his nightmare on the club settee, on which he had gone to sleep a little before midnight, and where the attendant who had quitted the house last had left him out of charity.
The misty dawn of a December morning was greying the window-panes.
Lucien went out into the street, pledged his watch, took a bath, breakfasted, and then went to the recruiting-office, and signed an engagement as volunteer in the 1st Regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique.
At the present time Lucien Hem is a lieutenant; he has only his pay to live upon, but he contrives to make it suffice, being a very steady officer and never touching a card. It appears even that he has found the means of saving, for the other day, at Algiers, one of his comrades who was following him, at a few paces distant, in one of the hilly streets of the Kasba, saw him give something in charity to a little Spanish girl sleeping in a doorway, and had the indiscretion to see what it was that Lucien had given to the child.
Great was his surprise at the poor lieutenant's generosity.
Lucien Hem had put into the hand of the poor child a piece of gold!
