PART III.
The hours passed, the light faded in the little garret where Marie's busy fingers toiled day after day to add to the little hoard so slowly accumulating, and Marie's cheerful heart brought out greater treasures of unselfish devotion, if her husband had only known it. Perhaps he did know it—in a fashion. Through the night, when it came, she thought often uneasily of Périne out in the heart of the great wicked city. But Périne had a haunt or two of her own, and Marie said prayers for her, and slept, hoping the girl would be safe.
She got up early the next morning while Jean was yet asleep, and cheered herself as she looked at her scanty supply of poor coffee with the thought that she would be paid for her work in the course of the day. Meanwhile the breakfast would not be a very rich affair, and she was pondering whether she could be so extravagant as to run to a crêmerie near at hand for two sous-worth of milk, when an unexpected sound filled her with dismay. It was Périne's shuffling steps upon the stairs, and she was by no means sure how Jean would receive such an early visitor. Moreover, she did not care that he should be disturbed, and she went hastily to the door to moderate the noise of the girl's awkward entry. For a wonder no word or look of hers could do this. Périne, who generally was obedient to her smallest sign, was in a state of uncontrollable excitement; she fled to Marie's arms, buried her rough head there, sobbed her loudest, and presently, in the thick of incoherent lamentations, pulled down her dress, and showed a heavy bruise on her shoulder. Then she sobbed again, and implored Madame Didier not to let them beat her.
"Come, come, come!" said Marie reassuringly, "tell me a little more about this, and don't be a baby, Périne. Remember that you are a big girl. No one will come here to beat you; if they did, good M. Plon would not let them come up the stairs. Tell me who did it?"
She sat down on the stool as she spoke, and let the poor clumsy creature rest on her knee.
"The man, the bad man!" howled Périne.
"That I hear; but what were you doing to make any one so cruel?"
"Périne only looking at pretty bright figures, mother; so pretty with the light on them. 7639."
"What is she talking about?" said Madame Didier, puzzled, "7639?"
"Yes, yes," said the girl eagerly, and then she broke off again into her lamentations, which lasted until Marie had bathed her hurt, and soothed her by degrees. But when she proposed to take her to the crêmerie, Périne began to wail again, and it was evident that something had so terrified her, that it would be cruelty to force her out into the streets. Every now and then she let drop another word or two on the subject of her fright; her poor disconnected brain seemed unable to grasp anything as a whole; something would float across it and be lost. Marie had grown apt at gathering together these cobweb strands, and disentangling them, but now even her ingenuity was at fault, and the number was the only point which stood out clearly from wavering words about a man and a box. She gathered at last that somewhere or other this number with the light shining on it had attracted Périne's attention, that she went to look, and that a man pushed her away with a blow, and with threats which had been strong enough to send her terrified from the spot. Evidently she scarcely felt secure in her present quarters, and piteously implored Marie not to suffer him to come. Marie soothed her, and hoped that Jean's compassion might be as strong as her own. Had she not been taken up with Périne, she would have more quickly caught the impatient scratching like a mouse in the wainscot, with which he summoned her.