"
Nevertheless, for once the police were wrong. Jean was not shot, though
it was true he was shot at. Fear, or loss of blood, or an instinctive
effort at self-preservation, caused him to reel and fall just a second
before a couple of bullets which should have found a home in his body,
spent themselves in the blood-stained wall over his head. The tide of
slaughter ebbed away, leaving ghastly heaps of dead men. From one of
these a shadow by-and-by detached itself, and drifted homewards, to the
spot where Marie was waiting in terrible anguish.
Her courage came back with the need for it; it took very little to add
to the disguise which fire and a wound had brought upon him; the people
in the house were at that moment much occupied with dragging down the
papers they had pasted over their windows. He crawled upstairs, and when
she had hastily bound up his wound, and given him some food, he managed
to get out on the roof through the trap-door. There he spent three days,
coming down at night, till she was able to put up her new chintz
curtains, and here in the garret he had remained ever since, sometimes
fairly patient, sometimes finding his lot insupportable, and railing at
fate, at Marie, and at Providence. He had had a few narrow escapes, but
his wife was as cunning as a fox when he was concerned, and fortune had
favoured him.
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