oor. The children--little
girls in _fanchons_ who flitted up the dark stairway and brightened it
as if with flowers, little girls in whom she saw, as she so often saw in
dreams, her own little one, living and grown to girlhood--she saw them
stop and look at her with wide open eyes that seemed to recoil from her;
then the little creatures would turn and run breathlessly up-stairs,
and, when they were well out of reach, would lean over the rail until
they almost fell, and hurl impure jests at her, the insults of the
children of the common people. Insulting words, poured out upon her by
those rosebud mouths, wounded Germinie more deeply than all else. She
would half rise for an instant; then, overwhelmed by shame, resigning
herself to her fate, she would fall back into her corner, and, pulling
her shawl over her head in order to bury herself therein out of sight,
she would sit like a dead woman, crushed, inert, insensible, cowering
over her own shadow, like a bundle tossed on the floor which everyone
might tread upon--having no control of her faculties, dead to everything
except the footsteps that she was listening for--and that did not come.

At last, after long hours, hours that she could not count, she would
fancy that she heard a stumbling walk in the street; then a vinous voice
would mount the stairs, stammering "_Canaille!_ _canaille_ of a
saloon-keeper!--you sold me the kind of wine that goes to my head!"

It was he.

And almost every day the same scene was enacted.

"Ah! there y'are, my Germinie," he would say as his eyes fell upon her.
"It's like this--I'll tell you all about it. I'm a little bit under
water." And, as he put the key in the lock: "I'll tell you all about it.
It isn't my fault."

He would enter the room, kick aside a turtle-dove with mangy wings that
limped forward to greet him, and close the door. "It wasn't me, d'ye
see. It was Paillon, you know Paillon? that little round fellow, fat as
a mad dog. Well, it was him, 'pon my honor. He insisted on paying for a
sixteen-sous bottle for me. He offered to treat me, and I _proffered_
him thanks. Thereupon we naturally _consoled_[5] our coffee; when you're
consoled, you console! and as one thing led to another, we fell upon
each other! There was a very devil of a carnage! The proof of it is that
that gallows-bird of a saloon-keeper threw us out-o'-doors like lobster
shells!"

Germinie, during the explanation, would have lighted the candle, stuck
in