nce, Rivet would sleep in the workshop on the shavings; his
wife was going to share her bed with her sister-in-law, and Fernande and
Raphaele were to sleep together in the next room. Louise and Flora were
put into the kitchen, where they had a mattress on the floor, and Rosa
had a little dark cupboard at the top of the stairs to herself, close to
the loft, where the candidate for confirmation was to sleep.

When the girl came in, she was overwhelmed with kisses; all the women
wished to caress her, with that need of tender expansion, that habit of
professional wheedling, which had made them kiss the ducks in the
railway carriage.

They all of them took her onto their laps, stroked her soft, light
hair, and pressed her in their arms with vehement and spontaneous
outbursts of affection, and the child, who was very good and religious,
bore it all patiently.

As the day had been a fatiguing one for every body, they all went to bed
soon after dinner. The whole village was wrapped in that perfect
stillness of the country, which is almost like a religious silence, and
the girls, who were accustomed to the noisy evenings of their
establishment, felt rather impressed by the perfect repose of the
sleeping village, and they shivered, not with cold, but with those
little shivers of solitude which come over uneasy and troubled hearts.

As soon as they were in bed, two and two together, they clasped each
other in their arms, as if to protect themselves against this feeling of
the calm and profound slumber of the earth. But Rosa _the Jade_, who
was alone in her little dark cupboard, felt a vague and painful emotion
come over her.

She was tossing about in bed, unable to get to sleep, when she heard the
faint sobs of a crying child close to her head through the partition.
She was frightened, and called out, and was answered by a weak voice,
broken by sobs. It was the little girl, who was always used to sleeping
in her mother's room, and who was frightened in her small attic.

Rosa was delighted, got up softly so as not to awaken anyone, and went
and fetched the child. She took her into her warm bed, kissed her and
pressed her to her bosom, cossetted her, lavished exaggerated
manifestations of tenderness on her, and at last grew calmer herself and
went to sleep. And till morning, the candidate for confirmation slept
with her head on the prostitute's naked bosom.

At five o'clock, the little church bell ringing the _Angelus_, woke