r. I guide her, ask questions and
listen, leaning over her and making little steps. But she is too
little, and too lispful, and cannot explain. Carefully I lead the
child,--who sees so feebly that already she is blind in the evening, as
far as the low door of the dilapidated dwelling where she nests.

In my street, in front of his lantern-shaped house, with its
iron-grilled dormer, old Eudo is standing, darkly hooded, and pointed,
like the house.

I am a little afraid of him. Assuredly, he has not got a clean
conscience. But, however guilty, he is compassionable. I stop and
speak to him. He lifts to me out of the night of his hood a face
pallid and ruined. I speak about the weather, of approaching spring.
Heedless he hears, shapes "yes" with the tip of his lips, and says,
"It's twelve years now since my wife died; twelve years that I've been
utterly alone; twelve years that I've heard the last words she said to
me."

And the poor maniac glides farther away, hooded in his unintelligible
mourning; and certainly he does not hear me wish him good-night.

At the back of the cold downstairs room a fire has been lighted. Mame
is sitting on the stool beside it, in the glow of the flaming coal,
outstretching her hands, clinging to the warmth.

Entering, I see the bowl of her back. Her lean neck has a cracked look
and is white as a bone. Musingly, my aunt takes and holds a pair of
idle tongs. I take my seat. Mame does not like the silence in which I
wrap myself. She lets the tongs fall with a jangling shock, and then
begins vivaciously to talk to me about the people of the neighborhood.
"There's everything here. No need to go to Paris, nor even so much as
abroad. This part; it's a little world cut out on the pattern of the
others," she adds, proudly, wagging her worn-out head. "There aren't
many of them who've got the wherewithal and they're not of much
account. Puppets, if you like, yes. That's according to how one sees
it, because at bottom there's no puppets,--there's people that look
after themselves, because each of us always deserves to be happy, my
lad. And here, the same as everywhere, the two kinds of people that
there are--the discontented and the respectable; because, my lad,
what's always been always will be."

CHAPTER III

EVENING AND DAWN

Just at the moment when I was settling down to audit the Sesmaisons'
account--I remember that detail--there came an unusual sound of steps
a