Marguerite had got to retrieve them all. In the dreadful penury in which she lived, a single franc had the importance of gold. So she ran about the room, searched under tables and chairs and in the corners. The seven francs were all her capital. They stood between her and death by hunger. She must go on her knees and peer through the veil of her tears for the last of them. Even the women behind the door, hardened though they were, felt the humiliation of that scene in the marrow of their bones, felt it as something horrible and poignant and disturbing. As soon as Marguerite had picked up her money, Madame Delagrange shuffled out from behind her counter.
“Now come along with me. I mean to see that you don’t take away what doesn’t belong to you.”
She took the weeping girl by the elbow and pushed her along in front of her to the dressing room. Then she stood over her whilst she changed into her street dress and put up her dancing kit in a bundle.
“Do you miss anything, girls?” Madame Delagrange asked with her heavy-handed irony and indeed with an evident hope that one of them would miss something and the police could be sent for. But all of them were quick to say no, though not one of them had the courage to take Marguerite by the hand and wish her good luck in the face of the old blowsy termagant.
“Very well then!” and Madame Delagrange took a step towards Marguerite who shrank back as if she expected a blow. Madame Delagrange laughed heartily at the girl’s face, rejoicing to see her so cowed and broken.
“Come here,” she said with a grim sort of pleasantry and she grinned and beckoned with her finger.
Marguerite faltered across the room, and the big woman took her prisoner again and marched her out through the Bar onto the verandah.
“There! You can go out by the garden and a good riddance to you!” Madame Delagrange banged to the big doors behind Marguerite Lambert and bolted them, leaving her with her bundle in her hand standing on the boards beneath the roof of vines.
“That’s the last we saw of her. Poor kid!” said Henriette. “If she hadn’t been such a little fool! Do you know that for a moment or two I hoped that your friend—”
“Paul,” Gerard de Montignac interrupted with a nod of his head. “I also—for a moment or two. But women don’t mean much to Paul.”