“It is astonishing,” reflected Chirac, “how France is loved!  And yet ...!  But to live, what will he do?  Must live!”

Sophia merely shrugged her shoulders.

“Then it is finished between you two?” he muttered awkwardly.

She nodded.  She was on her knees, at the lower crack of the doors.

“There!” she said, rising.  “It’s well done, isn’t it?  That is all.”

She smiled at him, facing him squarely, in the obscurity of the untidy and shabby corridor.  Both felt that they had become very intimate.  He was intensely flattered by her attitude, and she knew it.

“Now,” she said, “I will take off my pinafore.  Where can I niche you?  There is only my bedroom, and I want that.  What are we to do?”

“Listen,” he suggested diffidently.  “Will you do me the honour to come for a drive?  That will do you good.  There is sunshine.  And you are always very pale.”

“With pleasure,” she agreed cordially.

While dressing, she heard him walking up and down the corridor; occasionally they exchanged a few words.  Before leaving, Sophia pulled off the paper from one of the key-holes of the sealed suite of rooms, and they peered through, one after the other, and saw the green glow of the sulphur, and were troubled by its uncanniness.  And then Sophia refixed the paper.

In descending the stairs of the house she felt the infirmity of her knees; but in other respects, though she had been out only once before since her illness, she was conscious of a sufficient strength.  A disinclination for any enterprise had prevented her from taking the air as she ought to have done, but within the flat she had exercised her limbs in many small tasks.  The little Chirac, nervously active and restless, wanted to take her arm, but she would not allow it.

The concierge and part of her family stared curiously at Sophia as she passed under the archway, for the course of her illness had excited the interest of the whole house.  Just as the carriage was driving off, the concierge came across the pavement and paid her compliments, and then said: 

“You do not know by hazard why Madame Foucault has not returned for lunch, madame?”

“Returned for lunch!” said Sophia.  “She will not come back till to-morrow.”

The concierge made a face.  “Ah!  How curious it is!  She told my husband that she would return in two hours.  It is very grave!  Question of business.”

“I know nothing, madame,” said Sophia.  She and Chirac looked at each other.  The concierge murmured thanks and went off muttering indistinctly.

The fiacre turned down the Rue Laferriere, the horse slipping and sliding as usual over the cobblestones.  Soon they were on the boulevard, making for the Champs Elysees and the Bois de Boulogne.