there to
embrace and tranquillise them both?

"And your papa, my dear," said Pierre to Celine, "isn't he here either?"

"Oh! no, monsieur, he has gone away."

"What, gone away?"

"Yes, he hasn't been home to sleep, and we don't know where he is."

"Perhaps he's working."

"Oh, no! he'd send us some money if he was."

"Then he's gone on a journey, perhaps?"

"I don't know."

"He wrote to Mamma Theodore, no doubt?"

"I don't know."

Pierre asked no further questions. In fact, he felt somewhat ashamed of
his attempt to extract information from this child of eleven, whom he
thus found alone. It was quite possible that she knew nothing, that
Salvat, in a spirit of prudence, had even refrained from sending any
tidings of himself. Indeed, there was an expression of truthfulness on
the child's fair, gentle and intelligent face, which was grave with the
gravity that extreme misery imparts to the young.

"I am sorry that Mamma Theodore isn't here," said Pierre, "I wanted to
speak to her."

"But perhaps you would like to wait for her, Monsieur l'Abbe. She has
gone to my Uncle Toussaint's in the Rue Marcadet; and she can't stop much
longer, for she's been away more than an hour."

Thereupon Celine cleared one of the chairs on which lay a handful of
scraps of wood, picked up on some waste ground.

The bare and fireless room was assuredly also a breadless one. Pierre
could divine the absence of the bread-winner, the disappearance of the
man who represents will and strength in the home, and on whom one still
relies even when weeks have gone by without work. He goes out and scours
the city, and often ends by bringing back the indispensable crust which
keeps death at bay. But with his disappearance comes complete
abandonment, the wife and child in danger, destitute of all prop and
help.

Pierre, who had sat down and was looking at that poor, little, blue-eyed
girl, to whose lips a smile returned in spite of everything, could not
keep from questioning her on another point. "So you don't go to school,
my child?" said he.

She faintly blushed and answered: "I've no shoes to go in."

He glanced at her feet, and saw that she was wearing a pair of ragged old
list-slippers, from which her little toes protruded, red with cold.

"Besides," she continued, "Mamma Theodore says that one doesn't go to
school when one's got nothing to eat. Mamma Theodore wanted to work but
she couldn't, because her eyes got burning hot and fu