return--indeed, she was only too happy to see him
back again after her anxious waiting. At such times he madly scoured
Paris, especially the outlying quarters, from a longing to debase
himself and hob-nob with labourers. He expressed at each recurring
crisis his old regret at not being some mason's hodman. Did not
happiness consist in having solid limbs, and in performing the work one
was built for well and quickly? He had wrecked his life; he ought to
have got himself engaged in the building line in the old times when he
had lunched at the 'Dog of Montargis,' Gomard's tavern, where he had
known a Limousin, a big, strapping, merry fellow, whose brawny arms he
envied. Then, on coming back to the Rue Tourlaque, with his legs faint
and his head empty, he gave his picture much the same distressful,
frightened glance as one casts at a corpse in a mortuary, until fresh
hope of resuscitating it, of endowing it with life, brought a flush to
his face once more.

One day Christine was posing, and the figure of the woman was again
well nigh finished. For the last hour, however, Claude had been growing
gloomy, losing the childish delight that he had displayed at the
beginning of the sitting. So his wife scarcely dared to breathe, feeling
by her own discomfort that everything must be going wrong once more, and
afraid that she might accelerate the catastrophe if she moved as much
as a finger. And, surely enough, he suddenly gave a cry of anguish, and
launched forth an oath in a thunderous voice.

'Oh, curse it! curse it!'

He had flung his handful of brushes from the top of the steps. Then,
blinded with rage, with one blow of his fist he transpierced the canvas.

Christine held out her trembling hands.

'My dear, my dear!'

But when she had flung a dressing-gown over her shoulders, and
approached the picture, she experienced keen delight, a burst of
satisfied hatred. Claude's fist had struck 'the other one' full in the
bosom, and there was a gaping hole! At last, then, that other one was
killed!

Motionless, horror-struck by that murder, Claude stared at the
perforated bosom. Poignant grief came upon him at the sight of the wound
whence the blood of his work seemed to flow. Was it possible? Was it
he who had thus murdered what he loved best of all on earth? His anger
changed into stupor; his fingers wandered over the canvas, drawing the
ragged edges of the rent together, as if he had wished to close the
bleeding gash. He was