At last his breath failed him and he sank down in despair, waiting for death; but as it was a long time coming, he began to recover a little courage, and, turning round, stared hard into the night. Not a thing was visible amid the loneliness of the fields, and the moon seemed to be grinning down at him from the sky. Then he discovered that the two shadows that had terrified him so were only the shadows of his own two ears. This was mortifying! Day dawned by slow degrees; and presently he found himself back by the brook, the ducks, the cow-shed and the kitchen-garden. “Mind this,” his mother told him, “there’s no adventures so fine as to match the pleasure of being safe at home, among the folks who love you.” “Monsieur Friquet” Nature had not been generous to the poor thing; Claire was born a hunchback, and a hunchback she had grown up—if indeed she can be said ever to have grown up—an undersized, sickly, suffering creature, who at thirty was not as high, from head to heels, as a little girl of nine. She had been left an orphan when quite a child; first her mother died, and her father had not survived her long. So Claire had had to face the world alone, with her own ten fingers for all her fortune. Her parents had never spoilt her with overmuch indulgence. They were poor, hardworking folks, who hardly knew what it was to smile. Even when they were alive, she had led a lonely enough existence. Still, after their death, she missed the life lived in common, the destitution shared with others, the bustle of the hugger-mugger household, where scolding and grumbling were by no means unknown. Her parents were her parents after all; with them life had its happy moments, now and then. [Illustration: “MONSIEUR FRIQUET”] They were hard times now for Claire. Shut up all day long in the unhealthy air of workrooms, she seemed to grow more and more emaciated, and smaller and smaller every day. Nobody ever thought of pitying the poor, uncouth being who sat sewing apart from the rest, who, with a gentle humility, always sought the shade, where her deformity was less noticeable; nobody ever dreamed of asking if there was a soul within that misshapen body, and her great eyes—light blue, sickly-looking eyes, which she would raise slowly and languidly, as if afraid of the light—encountered only mockery and indifference from all about her. The tall, handsome girls who sat round the sewing-table had nothing but hard words for her; scarcely knowing why, yielding to a cruel impulse which a little thought, if nothing better, would have checked, they treated her vilely. Little by little she had become the general butt of the workroom; one dismal day in December a last outrage was added to all the rest.