standing at the gate side by side with Saint Peter.'
And still laughing he turned and went out of the shop.
'He is stubborn, that Goundran,' sighed Madame
Roustan.
§3
Three nights later Madame Roustan, feeling
thoroughly tired, decided to go to her bed rather
sarly. The weather was hot for the time of year and
tier small sitting-room seemed unpleasantly airless;
added to which a high, clarion note had just
announced the first spiteful mosquito.
Madame Roustan both liked and admired her
bed-room with its shiny mock-mahogany suite pur-
chased by her late husband in Toulon; with its salmon-
pink neatly distempered walls, and its double bed
made of the best lacquered brass, from the arms of
which depended pink curtains; with its crucifix
hanging above the bed in a species of very ornate
glazed coffin; with its piety books on their little gilt
shelf, and its prie-dieu at which she now so seldom
knelt, the moths having eaten away its cushion. All
these furnishings seemed to her very select — she felt
that they set her apart from her neighbours.
In a stout and fairly capacious cot made by Jouse
and considered by Madame Roustan to be the one
blemish upon the apartment, lay the infant cousins,
Christophe and Jan. To Madame Roustan's enormous
relief as she tiptoed about, they were placidly sleeping.
Every night since her godson's unwelcome advent
her much-needed rest had been ruthlessly broken —
either by Christophe who ground his gums, then woke
up in a consequent sweat of anguish, or by Jan who,
preferring his cot to himself, was not always polite to
the new arrival. But now — praise be to God and the
Holy Flower — they seemed peaceful enough and were
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