three men quitted the women's workshop amidst profound silence, which
only the whir of the little grinders disturbed.

When the fitting difficulty had been overcome downstairs and Moineaud had
received his orders, Beauchene returned to his residence accompanied by
Mathieu, who wished to convey Marianne's invitation to Constance. A
gallery connected the black factory buildings with the luxurious private
house on the quay. And they found Constance in a little drawing-room hung
with yellow satin, a room to which she was very partial. She was seated
near a sofa, on which lay little Maurice, her fondly prized and only
child, who had just completed his seventh year.

"Is he ill?" inquired Mathieu.

The child seemed sturdily built, and he greatly resembled his father,
though he had a more massive jaw. But he was pale and there was a faint
ring round his heavy eyelids. His mother, that "bag of bones," a little
dark woman, yellow and withered at six-and-twenty, looked at him with an
expression of egotistical pride.

"Oh, no! he's never ill," she answered. "Only he has been complaining of
his legs. And so I made him lie down, and I wrote last night to ask Dr.
Boutan to call this morning."

"Pooh!" exclaimed Beauchene with a hearty laugh, "women are all the same!
A child who is as strong as a Turk! I should just like anybody to tell me
that he isn't strong."

Precisely at that moment in walked Dr. Boutan, a short, stout man of
forty, with very keen eyes set in a clean-shaven, heavy, but extremely