When Desiree entered the room, a man rose from the shadow and came to meet her, holding out his hand.

It was the man of the reward, her hideous rescuer at twenty-five francs.

“Well, little-mother,” he said, with his cynical laugh, and in a voice that made one think of foggy nights on the water, “how are we since our dive?”

The unhappy girl was burning red with fever and shame; so bewildered that it seemed to her as if the river had left a veil over her eyes, a buzzing in her ears.  At last she was ushered into a smaller room, into the presence of a pompous individual, wearing the insignia of the Legion of Honor, Monsieur le Commissaire in person, who was sipping his ’cafe au lait’ and reading the ‘Gazette des Tribunaux.’

“Ah! it’s you, is it?” he said in a surly tone and without raising his eyes from his paper, as he dipped a piece of bread in his cup; and the officer who had brought Desiree began at once to read his report: 

“At quarter to twelve, on Quai de la Megisserie, in front of No. 17, the woman Delobelle, twenty-four years old, flower-maker, living with her parents on Rue de Braque, tried to commit suicide by throwing herself into the Seine, and was taken out safe and sound by Sieur Parcheminet, sand-hauler of Rue de la Butte-Chaumont.”

Monsieur le Commissaire listened as he ate, with the listless, bored expression of a man whom nothing can surprise; at the end he gazed sternly and with a pompous affectation of virtue at the woman Delobelle, and lectured her in the most approved fashion.  It was very wicked, it was cowardly, this thing that she had done.  What could have driven her to such an evil act?  Why did she seek to destroy herself?  Come, woman Delobelle, answer, why was it?

But the woman Delobelle obstinately declined to answer.  It seemed to her that it would put a stigma upon her love to avow it in such a place.  “I don’t know—­I don’t know,” she whispered, shivering.

Testy and impatient, the commissioner decided that she should be taken back to her parents, but only on one condition:  she must promise never to try it again.

“Come, do you promise?”

“Oh! yes, Monsieur.”

“You will never try again?”

“Oh! no, indeed I will not, never—­never!”

Notwithstanding her protestations, Monsieur le Commissaire de Police shook his head, as if he did not trust her oath.

Now she is outside once more, on the way to her home, to a place of refuge; but her martyrdom was not yet at an end.

In the carriage, the officer who accompanied her was too polite, too affable.  She seemed not to understand, shrank from him, withdrew her hand.  What torture!  But the most terrible moment of all was the arrival in Rue de Braque, where the whole house was in a state of commotion, and the inquisitive curiosity of the neighbors must be endured.  Early in the morning the whole quarter had been informed of her disappearance.