The sight of the settlement and of these poor people without bread or fire overcame him. He preferred to go out and to weary himself with distant walks. One evening, as he was coming back and passing near Réquillart, he perceived an old woman who had fainted by the roadside. No doubt she was dying of hunger; and having raised her he began to shout to a girl whom he saw on the other side of the paling.
"Why! is it you?" he said, recognizing Mouquette. "Come and help me then, we must give her something to drink."
Mouquette, moved to tears, quickly went into the shaky hovel which her father had set up in the midst of the ruins. She came back at once with gin and a loaf. The gin revived the old woman, who without speaking bit greedily into the bread. She was the mother of a miner who lived at a settlement on the Cougny side, and she had fallen there on returning from Joiselle, where she had in vain attempted to borrow half a franc from a sister. When she had eaten she went away dazed.
Étienne stood in the open field of Réquillart, where the crumbling sheds were disappearing beneath the brambles.
"Well, won't you come in and drink a little glass?" asked Mouquette merrily.
And as he hesitated:
"Then you're still afraid of me?"
He followed her, won by her laughter. This bread, which she had given so willingly, moved him. She would not take him into her father's room, but led him into her own room, where she at once poured out two little glasses of gin. The room was very neat and he complimented her on it. Besides, the family seemed to want for nothing; the father continued his duties as a groom at the Voreux while she, saying that she could not live with folded arms, had become a laundress, which brought her in thirty sous a day. One may amuse oneself with men but one isn't lazy for all that.
"I say," she murmured, all at once coming and putting her arms round him prettily, "why don't you like me?"
He could not help laughing, she had done this in so charming a way.