and silent, he came upon an unexpected scene which utterly amazed him. On
some pretext or other Norine had lingered there the last, and Beauchene
was with her, clasping her around the waist whilst he eagerly pressed his
lips to hers. But all at once they caught sight of Mathieu and remained
thunderstruck. And he, for his part, fled precipitately, deeply annoyed
at having been a surprised witness to such a secret.



II

MORANGE, the chief accountant at Beauchene's works, was a man of
thirty-eight, bald and already gray-headed, but with a superb dark,
fan-shaped beard, of which he was very proud. His full limpid eyes,
straight nose, and well-shaped if somewhat large mouth had in his younger
days given him the reputation of being a handsome fellow. He still took
great care of himself, invariably wore a tall silk hat, and preserved the
correct appearance of a very painstaking and well-bred clerk.

"You don't know our new flat yet, do you?" he asked Mathieu as he led him
away. "Oh! it's perfect, as you will see. A bedroom for us and another
for Reine. And it is so close to the works too. I get there in four
minutes, watch in hand."

He, Morange, was the son of a petty commercial clerk who had died on his
stool after forty years of cloistral office-life. And he had married a
clerk's daughter, one Valerie Duchemin, the eldest of four girls whose
parents' home had been turned into a perfect hell, full of shameful
wretchedness and unacknowledgable poverty, through this abominable
incumbrance. Valerie, who was good-looking and ambitious, was lucky