At that moment old Dronski—a pillar of the gaming house, the classic Pole, wearing the threadbare hooded woollen cloak, ornamented all over with grease stains—approached Lucien, and muttered a few words in his grizzled beard: "Lend me a five-franc piece, monsieur. It's now two days since I have stirred out of the club, and for two days the 'seventeen' has never turned up. Laugh at me, if you like, but I'll suffer my hand to be cut off if that number does not turn up on the stroke of midnight."
Lucien Hem shrugged his shoulders. He had not even enough in his pocket to meet this tax, which the frequenters of the place called "The Pole's hundred sous." He passed into the antechamber, took his hat and fur coat, and descended the stairs with feverish rapidity.
Since four o'clock, when Lucien had shut himself up in the gaming-house, snow had fallen heavily, and the street—a street in the centre of Paris, very narrow, and built with high houses on either side—was completely white.
In the calm sky, blue-black, the cold stars glittered.
The ruined gambler shuddered under his furs, and walked away, his mind still teeming with thoughts of despair, and more than ever turning to the remembrance of the box of pistols which awaited him in one of his drawers; but after moving forward a few steps, he stopped suddenly before a heart-wringing sight.
On a stone bench, placed according to old custom near the monumental door of a mansion, a little girl of six or seven years of age, dressed in a ragged black frock, was sitting in the snow. She was sleeping, in spite of the cruel cold, in an attitude of frightful fatigue and exhaustion: her poor little head and tiny shoulder pressed as if they had sunk into an angle of the wall, and reposing on the icy stone. One of her wooden shoes had fallen from her foot, which hung helplessly and lugubriously before her.
With a mechanical gesture, Lucien put his hand to his waistcoat pocket, but a moment afterwards he recollected that he had not been able to find even a forgotten piece of twenty-sous, and had been obliged to leave the club without giving the customary "tip" to the club attendant; yet, moved by an instinctive feeling of pity, he approached the little girl, and might, perhaps, have taken her in his arms and given her a night's lodging, when in the wooden shoe which had slipped from her foot he saw something glitter.
He stooped: it was a gold coin.
II.
Some charitable person, doubtless some lady, had passed by, had seen on this Christmas night the little wooden shoe lying in front of the sleeping child, and, recalling the touching legend, had placed there, with a secret hand, a magnificent offering, so that this poor abandoned one might believe in presents made for the infant Saviour, and preserve, in spite of her misfortune, some confidence and some hope in the goodness of Providence.