Chirac made a heart-rending spectacle, and Sophia was aware of deep and painful emotion in seeing him thus.  He must have been utterly exhausted and broken by loss of sleep.  He was a man incapable of regular hours, incapable of treating his body with decency.  Though going to bed at three o’clock, he had continued to rise at his usual hour.  He looked like one dead; but more sad, more wistful.  Outside in the street a fog reigned, and his thin draggled beard was jewelled with the moisture of it.  His attitude had the unconsidered and violent prostration of an overspent dog.  The beaten animal in him was expressed in every detail of that posture.  It showed even in his white, drawn eyelids, and in the falling of a finger.  All his face was very sad.  It appealed for mercy as the undefended face of sleep always appeals; it was so helpless, so exposed, so simple.  It recalled Sophia to a sense of the inner mysteries of life, reminding her somehow that humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.  She did not physically shudder; but her soul shuddered.

She mechanically placed the saucepan on the lamp, and the noise awakened Chirac.  He groaned.  At first he did not perceive her.  When he saw that some one was looking down at him, he did not immediately realize who this some one was.  He rubbed his eyes with his fists, exactly like a baby, and sat up, and the chair cracked.

“What then?” he demanded.  “Oh, madame, I ask pardon.  What?”

“You have nearly destroyed the house,” she said.  “I smelt fire, and I came in.  I was just in time.  There is no danger now.  But please be careful.”  She made as if to move towards the door.

“But what did I do?” he asked, his eyelids wavering.

She explained.

He rose from his chair unsteadily.  She told him to sit down again, and he obeyed as though in a dream.

“I can go now,” she said.

“Wait one moment,” he murmured.  “I ask pardon.  I should not know how to thank you.  You are truly too good.  Will you wait one moment?”

His tone was one of supplication.  He gazed at her, a little dazzled by the light and by her.  The lamp and the candle illuminated the lower part of her face, theatrically, and showed the texture of her blue flannel peignoir; the pattern of a part of the lace collar was silhouetted in shadow on her cheek.  Her face was flushed, and her hair hung down unconfined.  Evidently he could not recover from his excusable astonishment at the apparition of such a figure in his room.

“What is it—­now?” she said.  The faint, quizzical emphasis which she put on the ‘now’ indicated the essential of her thought.  The sight of him touched her and filled her with a womanly sympathy.  But that sympathy was only the envelope of her disdain of him.  She could not admire weakness.  She could but pity it with a pity in which scorn was mingled.  Her instinct was to treat him as a child.  He had failed in