“Pardon, madame!” said one of the men, raising his hat, and they both pushed into the flat after her.  They stared, puzzled, at the strips of paper pasted on the doors.

“What do you want?” she asked haughtily.  She was very frightened.  The extraordinary interruption brought her down with a shock to the scale of the individual.

“I am the concierge,” said the man who had addressed her.  He had the air of a superior artisan.  “It was my wife who spoke to you this afternoon.  This,” pointing to his companion, “this is the law.  I regret it, but ...”

The law saluted and shut the front door.  Like the concierge, the law emitted an odour—­the odour of uncleanliness on a hot August day.

“The rent?” exclaimed Sophia.

“No, madame, not the rent:  the furniture!”

Then she learnt the history of the furniture.  It had belonged to the concierge, who had acquired it from a previous tenant and sold it on credit to Madame Foucault.  Madame Foucault had signed bills and had not met them.  She had made promises and broken them.  She had done everything except discharge her liabilities.  She had been warned and warned again.  That day had been fixed as the last limit, and she had solemnly assured her creditor that on that day she would pay.  On leaving the house she had stated precisely and clearly that she would return before lunch with all the money.  She had made no mention of a sick father.

Sophia slowly perceived the extent of Madame Foucault’s duplicity and moral cowardice.  No doubt the sick father was an invention.  The woman, at the end of a tether which no ingenuity of lies could further lengthen, had probably absented herself solely to avoid the pain of witnessing the seizure.  She would do anything, however silly, to avoid an immediate unpleasantness.  Or perhaps she had absented herself without any particular aim, but simply in the hope that something fortunate might occur.  Perhaps she had hoped that Sophia, taken unawares, would generously pay.  Sophia smiled grimly.

“Well,” she said.  “I can’t do anything.  I suppose you must do what you have to do.  You will let me pack up my own affairs?”

“Perfectly, madame!”

She warned them as to the danger of opening the sealed rooms.  The man of the law seemed prepared to stay in the corridor indefinitely.  No prospect of delay disturbed him.

Strange and disturbing, the triumph of the concierge!  He was a locksmith by trade.  He and his wife and their children lived in two little dark rooms by the archway—­an insignificant fragment of the house.  He was away from home about fourteen hours every day, except Sundays, when he washed the courtyard.  All the other duties of the concierge were performed by the wife.  The pair always looked poor, untidy, dirty, and rather forlorn.  But they were steadily levying toll on everybody in the big house.  They amassed money in forty ways.  They lived for money, and all men have what they live