Augustine did not come the next day, nor the next, for the paper. The unhappy looking child who had returned for more foolscap, informed Mamzelle Fleurette that he had heard his mother say that Monsieur Lacodie was very sick, and the bellhanger had sat up all night with him. The following day Mamzelle Fleurette saw Choppin’s coupé pass over the cobblestones and stop before the locksmith’s 283door. She knew that with her class it was only in a case of that the famous and expensive physician was summoned. For the first time she thought of death. She prayed all day, silently, to herself, even while waiting upon customers.  
In the evening she took an Abeille from the top of the pile on the counter, and throwing a light shawl over her head, started with the paper over to the locksmith’s shop. She did not know if she were committing a sin in so doing. She would ask Father Fochelle on Saturday, when she went to . She did not think it could be a sin; she would have called long before on any other sick neighbor, and she intuitively felt that in this distinction might lie the possibility of sin.
 
The shop was except for the presence of Lacodie’s little boy of five, who sat upon the floor playing with the tools and contrivances which all his days he had , and which all his days had been denied to him. Mamzelle Fleurette mounted the narrow stairway in the rear of the shop which led to an upper landing and then into the room of the married couple. She stood a while hesitating 284upon this landing before venturing to knock softly upon the partly open door through which she could hear their voices.
 
“I thought,” she remarked apologetically to Augustine, “that perhaps Monsieur Lacodie might like to look at the paper and you had no time to come for it, so I brought it myself.”
 
“Come in, come in, Mamzelle Fleurette. It’s Mamzelle Fleurette who comes to inquire about you, Lacodie,” Augustine called out loudly to her husband, whose half consciousness she somehow confounded with deafness.
 
Mamzelle Fleurette drew forward, clasping her thin hands together at the waist line, and she peeped at Lacodie lying lost amid the bedclothes. His black mane was tossed wildly over the pillow and lent a pallor to the yellow of his features. An approaching chill was sending through his frame, and making his teeth claque. But he still turned his head in Mamzelle Fleurette’s direction.
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