"See you tonight."
With a slow, reluctant step Rosalie got up and dragged herself to the house.
CHAPTER X
ONE SLEEPLESS NIGHT
AFTER her new friend had left, Perrine would like to have still sat at the table as though she were in her own place, but it was precisely because she was not in the place where she belonged that she felt she could not. She had learned that the little garden was reserved for the boarders and that the factory hands were not privileged to sit there. She could not see any seats near the old tumble-down house where she was to lodge, so she left the table and sauntered down the village street.
Although she went at a slow step, she had soon walked down all the streets, and as everyone stared at her, being a stranger, this had prevented her from stopping when she had wanted to.
On the top of the hill opposite the factories she had noticed a wood. Perhaps she would be alone there and could sit down without anyone paying attention to her.
She climbed the hill, then stretched herself out on the grass and looked down over the village ... her father's birthplace, which he had described so often to her mother and herself.
She had arrived at Maraucourt! This name, which she had repeated so often since she had trod on French soil, the name she had seen on the big vans standing outside the Gates of Paris. This was not a country of dreams. She was in Maraucourt; before her she could see the vast works which belonged to her grandfather. He had made his fortune here, bit by bit, sou by sou, until now he was worth millions.