ecting. He would stop some
neighbour's wife on the footway to ask her if she found his brawn or
truffled boar's head to her liking, and she would at once assume a
sympathetic expression, and speak in a condoling way, as though all the
pork on his premises had got jaundice.

"What do they all mean by looking at me with such a funereal air?" he
asked Lisa one day. "Do you think I'm looking ill?"

Lisa, well aware that he was terribly afraid of illness, and groaned
and made a dreadful disturbance if he suffered the slightest ailment,
reassured him on this point, telling him that he was as blooming as
a rose. The fine pork shop, however, was becoming gloomy; the mirrors
seemed to pale, the marbles grew frigidly white, and the cooked meats on
the counter stagnated in yellow fat or lakes of cloudy jelly. One day,
even, Claude came into the shop to tell his aunt that the display in
the window looked quite "in the dumps." This was really the truth. The
Strasburg tongues on their beds of blue paper-shavings had a melancholy
whiteness of hue, like the tongues of invalids; and the whilom chubby
hams seemed to be wasting away beneath their mournful green top-knots.
Inside the shop, too, when customers asked for a black-pudding or ten
sous' worth of bacon, or half a pound of lard, they spoke in subdued,
sorrowful voices, as though they were in the bed-chamber of a dying man.
There were always two or three lachrymose women in front of the chilled
heating-pan. Beautiful Lisa meantime discharged the duties of chief
mourner with silent dignity. Her white apron fell more primly than ever
over her black dress. Her hands, scrupulously clean and closely girded
at the wrists by long white sleevelets, her face with its becoming air
of sadness, plainly told all the neighbourhood, all the inquisitive
gossips who streamed into the shop from morning to night, that they, the
Quenu-Gradelles, were suffering from unmerited misfortune, but that she
knew the cause of it, and would triumph over it at last. And sometimes
she stooped to look at the two gold-fish, who also seemed ill at ease
as they swam languidly around the aquarium in the window, and her glance
seemed to promise them better days in the future.

Beautiful Lisa now only allowed herself one indulgence. She fearlessly
patted Marjolin's satiny chin. The young man had just come out of the
hospital. His skull had healed, and he looked as fat and merry as ever;
but even the little intelligenc