Norine was ever quarrelling with Euphrasie, and was pleased to have her caught in a misdeed; so she allowed her to rattle on.  And it thereupon became necessary for Beauchene to intervene.  He habitually evinced great severity in the women’s workshop, for he had hitherto held the view that an employer who jested with his workgirls was a lost man.  Thus, in spite of the low character of which he was said to give proof in his walks abroad, there had as yet never been the faintest suggestion of scandal in connection with him and the women in his employ.

“Well, now, Mademoiselle Euphrasie!” he exclaimed; “do you intend to be quiet?  This is quite improper.  You are fined twenty sous, and if I hear you again you will be locked out for a week.”

The girl had turned round in consternation.  Then, stifling her rage, she cast a terrible glance at her sister, thinking that she might at least have warned her.  But the other, with the discreet air of a pretty wench conscious of her attractiveness, continued smiling, looking her employer full in the face, as if certain that she had nothing to fear from him.  Their eyes met, and for a couple of seconds their glances mingled.  Then he, with flushed cheeks and an angry air, resumed, addressing one and all:  “As soon as the superintendent turns her back you chatter away like so many magpies.  Just be careful, or you will have to deal with me!”

Moineaud, the father, had witnessed the scene unmoved, as if the two girls—­she whom the master had scolded, and she who slyly gazed at him—­were not his own daughters.  And now the round was resumed and the three men quitted the women’s workshop amidst profound silence, which only the whir of the little grinders disturbed.

When the fitting difficulty had been overcome downstairs and Moineaud had received his orders, Beauchene returned to his residence accompanied by Mathieu, who wished to convey Marianne’s invitation to Constance.  A gallery connected the black factory buildings with the luxurious private house on the quay.  And they found Constance in a little drawing-room hung with yellow satin, a room to which she was very partial.  She was seated near a sofa, on which lay little Maurice, her fondly prized and only child, who had just completed his seventh year.

“Is he ill?” inquired Mathieu.

The child seemed sturdily built, and he greatly resembled his father, though he had a more massive jaw.  But he was pale and there was a faint ring round his heavy eyelids.  His mother, that “bag of bones,” a little dark woman, yellow and withered at six-and-twenty, looked at him with an expression of egotistical pride.

“Oh, no! he’s never ill,” she answered.  “Only he has been complaining of his legs.  And so I made him lie down, and I wrote last night to ask Dr. Boutan to call this morning.”

“Pooh!” exclaimed Beauchene with a hearty laugh, “women are all the same!  A child who is as strong as a Turk!  I should just like anybody to tell me that he isn’t strong.”