at the docks full of vessels--the _Bassin du
Commerce_, with other docks beyond, where the huge hulls lay side by
side, closely packed in rows, four or five deep. And masts innumerable;
along several kilometres of quays the endless masts, with their yards,
poles, and rigging, gave this great gap in the heart of the town
the look of a dead forest. Above this leafless forest the gulls were
wheeling, and watching to pounce, like a falling stone, on any scraps
flung overboard; a sailor boy, fixing a pulley to a cross-beam, looked
as if he had gone up there bird's-nesting.

"Will you dine with us without any sort of ceremony, just that we may
end the day together?" said Mme. Roland to her friend.

"To be sure I will, with pleasure; I accept equally without ceremony. It
would be dismal to go home and be alone this evening."

Pierre, who had heard, and who was beginning to be restless under the
young woman's indifference, muttered to himself: "Well, the widow is
taking root now, it would seem." For some days past he had spoken of her
as "the widow." The word, harmless in itself, irritated Jean merely by
the tone given to it, which to him seemed spiteful and offensive.

The three men spoke not another word till they reached the threshold of
their own house. It was a narrow one, consisting of a ground-floor and
two floors above, in the Rue Belle-Normande. The maid, Josephine, a girl
of nineteen, a rustic servant-of-all-work at low wages, gifted to excess
with the startled animal expression of a peasant, opened the door, went
up stairs at her master's heels to the drawing-room, which was on the
first floor, and then said:

"A gentleman called--three times."

Old Roland, who never spoke to her without shouting and swearing, cried
out:

"Who do you say called, in the devil's name?"

She never winced at her master's roaring voice, and replied:

"A gentleman from the lawyer's."

"What lawyer?"

"Why, M'sieu 'Canu--who else?"

"And what did this gentleman say?"

"That M'sieu 'Canu will call in himself in the course of the evening."

Maitre Lecanu was M. Roland's lawyer, and in a way his friend, managing
his business for him. For him to send word that he would call in the
evening, something urgent and important must be in the wind; and the
four Rolands looked at each other, disturbed by the announcement as
folks of small fortune are wont to be at any intervention of a lawyer,
with its suggestions of contracts, inherit