“Hush! I will explain matters later on. Can you give me shelter for a night or two?”
He stopped himself, turned terribly pale, and listened intently. He fancied he had heard a woman’s scream, and his own name uttered.
“Andre, it is I—your Sabine; help!”
Quick as lightning Andre rushed to the window, opened it, and leaned out to discover from whence those sounds came.
The young miscreant, Toto Chupin, had too fatally earned the note with which Tantaine had bribed him. The whole of the front of the window gave way with a loud crash, and Andre was hurled into space.
The hut was at least sixty feet from the pavement, and the fall was the more appalling because the body of Andre struck some of the intervening scaffolding first, and thence bounced off, until the unhappy young man fell with a dull thud, bleeding and senseless in the street.
Nearly three hundred persons in the Champs Elysees witnessed this hideous sight; for, at Vignol’s cry, every one had stopped, and, frozen with horror, had not missed one detail of the grim tragedy.
In an instant a crowd was collected round the poor, inert mass of humanity which lay motionless in a pool of blood. But two workmen, roused by Vignol’s shrieks, were soon on the spot, and pushed their way through the crowd of persons who were gazing with a morbid curiosity on the man who had fallen from a height of sixty feet.
Andre gave no sign of life. His face was dreadfully bruised, his eyes were closed, and a stream of blood poured from his mouth, as Vignol raised his friend’s head upon his knee.
“He is dead!” cried the lookers on. “No one could survive such a fall.”