“Frantz, my boy, it is old Sigismond who is writing to you.  If I knew better how to put my ideas on paper, I should have a very long story to tell you.  But this infernal French is too hard, and Sigismond Planus is good for nothing away from his figures.  So I will come to the point at once.

“Affairs in your brother’s house are not as they should be.  That woman is false to him with his partner.  She has made her husband a laughing-stock, and if this goes on she will cause him to be looked upon as a rascal.  Frantz, my boy, you must come home at once.  You are the only one who can speak to Risler and open his eyes about that little Sidonie.  He would not believe any of us.  Ask leave of absence at once, and come.

“I know that you have your bread to earn out there, and your future to assure; but a man of honor should think more of the name his parents gave him than of anything else.  And I tell you that if you do not come at once, a time will come when the name of Risler will be so overwhelmed with shame that you will not dare to bear it.

“SigismondPlanus,
“Cashier.”

CHAPTER XIII

THE JUDGE

Those persons who live always in doors, confined by work or infirmity to a chair by the window, take a deep interest in the people who pass, just as they make for themselves a horizon of the neighboring walls, roofs, and windows.

Nailed to their place, they live in the life of the streets; and the busy men and women who pass within their range of vision, sometimes every day at the same hour, do not suspect that they serve as the mainspring of other lives, that interested eyes watch for their coming and miss them if they happen to go to their destination by another road.

The Delobelles, left to themselves all day, indulged in this sort of silent observation.  Their window was narrow, and the mother, whose eyes were beginning to weaken as the result of hard usage, sat near the light against the drawn muslin curtain; her daughter’s large armchair was a little farther away.  She announced the approach of their daily passers-by.  It was a diversion, a subject of conversation; and the long hours of toil seemed shorter, marked off by the regular appearance of people who were as busy as they.  There were two little sisters, a gentleman in a gray overcoat, a child who was taken to school and taken home again, and an old government clerk with a wooden leg, whose step on the sidewalk had a sinister sound.

They hardly ever saw him; he passed after dark, but they heard him, and the sound always struck the little cripple’s ears like a harsh echo of her own mournful thoughts.  All these street friends unconsciously occupied a large place in the lives of the two women.  If it rained, they would say: 

“They will get wet.  I wonder whether the child got home before the shower.”  And when the season changed, when the March sun inundated the sidewalks or the December snow covered them with its white mantle and its patches of black mud, the appearance of a new garment on one of their friends caused the two recluses to say to themselves, “It is summer,” or, “winter has come.”