"It is ten minutes to seven."

"_Eh, bien, au revoir_, Madame Bathilde--I must go and set things going
in my small household. Alas, poor Josephine!"

Madame Chalumeau shook her head with great gravity.

"A great loss, M. Bouillard; an irreparable loss. But--my coffee is
nearly ready. Will you not let me give you a cup? There are also an
Auvergnat" (a double twist of well-made bread) "and a Bourdon sent me by
my cousin, Madame Decomplet, of the Rue d'Argentan----"

And ten minutes later the two gossips, as the pleasant old phrase runs,
were seated in Madame Chalumeau's little sitting-room behind her shop,
breakfasting together.

Monsieur Bouillard's Josephine had been dead for seven long years, and
in her life she had tormented the good man full sore; even as the Church
invariably defers canonisation until long after the death of the saint,
so Desire's appreciation of his wife's splendour of character was a
post-mortem tribute to be accepted without a murmur by all the faithful.

"I recall to myself every morning, Madame Bathilde," he began, removing
a large blob of honey from the dimple in his pink chin, "how that angel
used to arise and prepare herself for her day's work. And of an economy!
Charcoal did for her four times what it will for me. And times are
hard!"

Bathilde sighed sympathetically. "My faith, yes; she was a wonderful
manager, _pauvre ange_. The milk is at your elbow, M. Desire----"

Outside in her tiny garden a bee boomed somnolently among the red and
yellow flowers, and somewhere near at hand a church bell jerked its
unmusical summons to prayer.

Madame Chalumeau's face, glossy and red-and-white like a Norman apple,
wore an expression of anxious expectation. Moreover, she had put on a
narrow lace collar and pinned it with a coral brooch. It was the fifth
of the month.

M. Desire ate his way through the generously laid meal with comfort and
deliberation, his small blue eyes, deeply embedded in pink flesh,
twinkling with ease.

As the clock struck half-past seven he laid his knife down and wiped his
beardless mouth.

"Bathilde," he said, "you are very kind to a poor afflicted mourner."

"Ah--Desire!"

She was a woman of much sense, and she did not try to be coy.

"My heart, as you know, lies in the grave with my poor Josephine----"

"But of course, my dear friend----"

"But--man is not fit to live all alone. And I am convinced that if I
could ask her, that angel would----" He paused