hed creature! There she sits, and will sit till Marie comes back;
I wonder what she thinks would happen to her if she were to look round?
Lucky for me if she pictures some terrible fate. What sort of confused
nonsense is running through her head now? Soup and Marie take a
prominent place, I wager. So precious hard up does one become in this
rat's hole, that I make her my problem as she makes the soup hers, poor
wretch! Yet, my excellent friend, Jean Didier, I would counsel you to
keep your compassion for yourself, for, believe me, you want it at least
as much. As much? Rather, a hundred times more! For she--she knows
nothing of the blessings she has missed, while I--Heavens, I know too
well! To be cooped up here, to see no one but Marie and this idiot; to
be aware that at any moment any thing, the merest trifle, might betray
me to death, or at least transportation to New California,--was ever man
so unhappy in this world!"

Jean, who had a turn for the melodramatic, tugged despairingly with both
hands at his hair, Perine, meanwhile, intent upon the soup, bent forward
and stirred it.

"Soup for mother and Perine," she muttered.

"What red hands she has!" continued Jean with a grimace, "and I hate to
hear her call Marie, mother. But it's just Marie all over. She never
could see a poor wretch, were it only a hunted rat, but she must take it
up, and give herself all the trouble in the world, when she might have
left it alone. She was just the same as a little girl, I see her now, in
her little round cap and woollen frock, scattering food for the
frozen-out birds in the hard winters. Such a pretty, rosy-faced little
thing as she was, and they all so fond of her! I recollect taking her to
school in my wooden sledge, and she--What's the girl about now?
Why--what dog has bitten her! She has taken my tobacco from the
shelf--she--not--! Yes, by heaven, she has poured it all into the soup!"

"Perine heard mother say she wanted something to make the soup good,"
laughed the girl, nodding her head, and quite unconscious that behind
her the enraged Jean was violently shaking his fist.

"Horror! To see tobacco, dinner, everything ruined by that creature
without being able to say a word! It is simply atrocious of Marie to go
away, leave her to do all this mischief, and then expect me to put up
with it! My pipe, my one comfort! Ah-h-h-h! if only I could box her ears
and stop her from grinning away as if she had done a clever thing!"