thoughts still hovering about the five-franc
piece.

"It's a case for riotous living," she told herself, as she passed in
to the smooth paths beneath the trees. "Five francs' worth of real
dinner or something like that. Only I'm not feeling very riotous just
now."

What she felt was that the situation had to be looked at, but that
looking at it could not improve it. Things had come to an end; food
to eat, a bed to sleep in, the mere bare essentials of life had
ceased, and she had not an idea of what came next; how one entered
upon the process of starving to death in the streets. Passers-by,
strolling under the trees, glanced at her as she passed them,
preoccupied and unseeing, a neat, comely little figure of a girl in
her quiet clothes with her still composed face. She went slowly;
there was a seat which she knew of farther on, overshadowed by a lime
tree, where she meant to rest and put her thoughts in order; but
already at the back of her mind there had risen, vague as night,
oppressive as pain, tainting her disquiet with its presence, the hint
of a consciousness that, after all, one does not starve to death pas
si bete! One takes a shorter way.

A lean youth, with a black cotton cap pulled forward over one eye,
who had been lurking near, saw the jerk with which she lifted her
head as that black inspiration was clear to her, and the sudden
coldness and courage of her face, and moved away uneasily.

"Ye-es," said Annette slowly. "Ye-es! And now Ghh!"

A bend in the path had brought her suddenly to the seat under the
lime tree; she was within a couple of paces of it before she
perceived that it had already its occupant the long figure of a young
man who sprawled back with his face upturned to the day and slumbered
with all that disordered and unbeautiful abandon which goes with
daylight sleep. His head had fallen over on one shoulder; his mouth
was open; his hands, grimy and large, showed half shut in his lap.
There was a staring patch of black sticking plaster at the side of
his chin; his clothes, that were yet decent, showed stains here and
there; his face, young and slackened in sleep, was burned brick-red
by exposure. The whole figure of him, surrendered to weariness in
that unconscious and uncaring sprawl, seemed suddenly to answer her
question this was what happened next; this was the end unless one
found and took that shorter way.

"They walk till they can't walk any longer; then they sleep on
benches. I