friends with her sister, but Valentine was suspicious of her former intimacy with their mother, and repelled her advances. The months dragged on, months of eternal sewing, eternal saving, eternal nagging, eternal sameness. Then one evening, when her mother was standing in the kitchen, giving a last glance at everything before she went down to the theater, she suddenly threw up her arms, cried in a choking voice, “Henri!” and collapsed upon the floor. There was nobody in the house except Sylvia, who, though she felt very much frightened, tried for a long time, without success, to restore her mother to consciousness. At last her father came in and bent over his wife.

“Good God, she’s dead!” he exclaimed, and Sylvia broke into a sweat of horror to think that she had been alone in the twilight with something dead. Her father struggled to lift the body on the sofa, calling to Sylvia to come and help him. She began to whimper, and he swore at her for cowardice. A clock struck and Sylvia shrieked. Her father began to drag the body toward the sofa; playing-cards fell from his sleeves on the dead woman’s face.

“Didn’t she say anything before she died?” he asked. Sylvia shook her head.

“She was only forty-six, you know,” he said; in and out of his fingers, round and round his hand, slipped the ten-centime piece.

For some time after his wife’s death Henry Snow was inconsolable, and his loudly expressed grief had the effect of making Sylvia seem hard, for she grew impatient with him, especially when every week he used to sell some cherished piece of furniture. She never attempted to explain her sentiments when he accused her of caring more for furniture than for her dead mother; she felt it would be useless to explain them to him, and suffered in silence. What Sylvia found most inexplicable was the way in which her father throve on sorrow and every day seemed to grow younger. This fact struck her so sharply that one day she penetrated the hostility that had been gathering daily between her and Valentine and asked her sister if she had observed this queer change. Valentine got very angry; demanded what Sylvia meant; flung out some cruel sneers; and involved her in a scene with her father, who charged her with malice and underhanded behavior. Sylvia was completely puzzled by the effect of her harmless observation, and supposed that Valentine, who had always been jealous of her, had seized the opportunity to make further mischief. She could never understand why Valentine was jealous of her, because Valentine was really beautiful, and very much like her mother, enviable from any point of view, and even now obviously dearer to her stepfather than his own daughter. She would have liked to know where the caravan was now; she was sure that her father would no longer wish to forbid her adoption by Uncle Edouard and Aunt Elise.

The house grew emptier and emptier of furniture; Sylvia found it so hard to obtain any money from her father for current expenses that she was often hungry. She did not like to write to any of her older sisters, because she was afraid that Valentine would make it appear that she was in the wrong and trying to stir up trouble. Summer passed into autumn, and with the lengthening darkness the house became unbearably still; neither her father nor her sister was ever at home; even the clocks had now all disappeared. Sylvia could not bear to remain indoors; for in her nervous, hungry state old childish terrors were revived, and the great empty loft at the top of the house was once again inhabited by that one-legged man with whose clutches her mother used to frighten her when naughty long ago. There recurred, too, a story told by her mother on just such a gusty evening as these, of how, when she first came to Lille, she had found an armed burglar under her bed, and of how the man had been caught and imprisoned. Even her mother, who was not a nervous woman, had been frightened by his threats of revenge when he should be free again, and once when she and her mother were sewing together close to the dusky window her mother had fancied she had seen him pass the house, a large pale man in a dark suit. Supposing he should come back now for his revenge? And above all these other terrors was the dread of her mother’s ghost.

Sylvia took to going out alone every evening, whether it rained or blew, to seek in the streets relief from the silence of the desolate house. Loneliness came to seem to her the worst suffering imaginable, and the fear of it which was bred during these months haunted her for years to come.

In November, about half past eight of a windy night, Sylvia came back from one of her solitary walks and found her father sitting with a bottle of brandy in the kitchen. His face was haggard; his collar was loose; from time to time he mopped his forehead with a big blue handkerchief and stared at himself in a small cracked shaving-glass that he must have brought down from his bedroom. She asked if he were ill, and he told her not to worry him, but to go out and borrow a railway time-table.

When Sylvia returned she heard Valentine’s angry voice in the kitchen, and waited in the passage to know the cause of the dispute.

“No, I won’t come with you,” Valentine was saying. “You must be mad! If you’re in danger of going to prison, so much the worse for you. I’ve got plenty of people who’ll look after me.”

“But I’m your stepfather.”

Valentine’s laugh made Sylvia turn pale.

“Stepfather! Fine stepfather! Why, I hate you! Do you hear? I hate you! My man is waiting for me now, and he’ll laugh when he hears that a convict wants his step-daughter to go away with him. My mother may have loved you, but I’d like her to see you now. L’amour de sa vie. Son homme! Sa poupée, sa poupée! Ah, mais non alors! Sa poupée!”

Sylvia could not bear any longer this mockery of her mother’s love, and, bursting into the kitchen, she began to abuse Valentine with all the vulgar words she had learned from Blanche.

Valentine caught her sister by the shoulders and shook her violently:

“Tu seras bien avec ton père, sale gosse!”

Then she smacked her cheek several times and left the house.