"I thought you did not care."
"Not care!"
"But you said so," he persisted, manlike.
"Victor--you don't know how much I love you, and I don't know how I can
be such a brute as I am. But--it hurts me the worst. It--it kills me.
Say you forgive me."
"Dear child--I forget," he answered, as gently as a father. And
Felicite, on her way upstairs, heard him through the half-open door, and
smiled.
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
Madame Bathilde Chalumeau, her black cotton frock tucked up round her
plump figure over her scarlet-flannel petticoat, was dusting the windows
of her shop in the Rue Dessous l'Arche.
It was only six o'clock and the air as yet was cool, but the trees
leaning over the wall of Avocat Millot's garden opposite were grey with
dust and parched with the heat of an exceptionally warm September.
Madame Chalumeau, who was standing on a chair energetically flopping her
feather-brush over the panes of her double shop-front, sighed as she
looked up at the brilliant sky. "It is to be a heat of the devil," she
thought.
Next door to her, _chez_ Bouillard, nothing was stirring. Poor Desire,
being a widower, was apt to oversleep himself, and it was bad for his
trade.
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