"Young men require a lesson now and then." He shut the wicket and
retired deliberately into the interior of the house.
Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and
feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.
"Wormy old fox!" he cried. "If I had my hand under your twist, I
would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit."
A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long
passages. He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath. And
then the humour of the situation struck him, and he laughed and
looked lightly up to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking
over his discomfiture.
What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the frosty
streets. The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination,
and gave him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early
night might very well happen to him before morning. And he so
young! and with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement
before him! He felt quite pathetic over the notion of his own
fate, as if it had been some one else's, and made a little
imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning when they should
find his body.
He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between
his thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was on bad terms with
some old friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a
plight.
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