objects of terror to her. Throughout the week her ears heard footsteps
on the stairs coming to arrest her!

The shock was too violent for nerves as weak as hers. The mental
upheaval of that week of agony possessed her with an idea that hitherto
had only hovered about her--the idea of suicide. She began to listen,
with her head in her hands, to the voice that spoke to her of
deliverance. She opened her ears to the sweet music of death that we
hear in the background of life like the fall of mighty waters in the
distance, dying away in space. The temptations that speak to the
discouraged heart of the things that put an end to life so quickly and
so easily, of the means of quelling suffering with the hand, pursued and
solicited her. Her glance rested wistfully upon all the things about her
that could cure the disease called life. She accustomed her fingers and
her lips to them. She touched them, handled them, drew them near to her.
She sought to test her courage upon them and to obtain a foretaste of
death. She would remain for hours at her kitchen window with her eyes
fixed on the pavements in the courtyard down at the foot of the five
flights--pavements that she knew and could have distinguished from
others! As the daylight faded she would lean farther out bending almost
double over the ill-secured window-bar, hoping always that it would
give way and drag her down with it--praying that she might die without
having to make the desperate, voluntary leap into space to which she no
longer felt equal.

"Why, you'll fall out!" said mademoiselle one day, grasping her skirt
impulsively in her alarm. "What are you looking at down there in the
courtyard?"

"Oh! nothing--the pavements."

"In Heaven's name, are you crazy? How you frightened me!"

"Oh! people don't fall that way," said Germinie in a strange tone. "I
tell you, mademoiselle, in order to fall one must have a mighty longing
to do it!"

LI

Germinie had not been able to induce Gautruche, who was haunted by a
former mistress, to give her the key to his room. When he had not
returned she was obliged to await his coming outside, in the cold, dark
street.

At first she would walk back and forth in front of the house. She would
take twenty steps in one direction and twenty in the other. Then, as if
to prolong her period of waiting, she would take a longer turn, and,
going farther and farther every time, would end by extending her walk to
both ends of the bou