Then he turned and looked at the poor girl on the bed, her long hair flung negligently over the pillow, her face not wasted by disease, but plump and fresh as in life.
“Poor Fifine,” he sighed in agony; “how beautiful she is, and how I loved her and how she loved me! I shall never love again. From this time out my life, should I live, will be a desert waste. Should I live? Alas! I cannot, will not live. Why did I spring from that couch and break open the window? I cannot live without her; I will die with her.”
He commenced closing the window and looking for more charcoal, when something occurred to him.
“Come to think, I won’t die with her. Dying with her wouldn’t do her any good, and if I live, she, my love, will perpetually have something to look down upon.”
He merely walked down and reported a case of suicide, and after the investigation claimed the body as the next best friend, which was all right.
THE END OF THE LEGEND OF PARIS.
Then he sold the body to a medical college for dissection, for sixty dollars, and bought a second-class ticket and went home to New York and told his mother he had been robbed of his money, and got her to intercede with the irate father, and is, I believe, living in comparative luxury to-day.”
“How could he have got out on the street, if he had pawned all his clothes and his boots?” queried the Young Man who Knows Everything.
Tibbitts answered with asperity that there were so-called men everywhere in the world who perpetually strewed the salt of fact over the flowery fields of fancy. “You are the young man, I believe, who made me miserable the other day, by unearthing the fact that there never was a William Tell.”
The Professor, after thinking the tale over awhile, said that such a thing might have happened in Oshkosh, but never in Paris. In Paris the young woman would have lived and sold the body of the young man and started a café on the proceeds.