Eight was the hour at which she generally descended to the dining-room to breakfast with the doctor. And while waiting she made a careful toilette, arranged her hair, and put on another morning gown of white muslin with red spots. Then, having still a quarter of an hour on her hands, she satisfied an old desire and sat down to sew a piece of narrow lace, an imitation of Chantilly, on her working blouse, that black blouse which she had begun to find too boyish, not feminine enough. But on the stroke of eight she laid down her work, and went downstairs quickly. “You are going to breakfast entirely alone,” said Martine tranquilly to her, when she entered the dining-room. “How is that?” “Yes, the doctor called me, and I passed him in his egg through the half-open door. There he is again, at his mortar and his filter. We won’t see him now before noon.” Clotilde turned pale with disappointment. She drank her milk standing, took her roll in her hand, and followed the servant into the kitchen. There were on the ground floor, besides this kitchen and the dining-room, only an uninhabited room in which the potatoes were stored, and which had formerly been used as an office by the doctor, when he received his patients in his house—the desk and the armchair had years ago been taken up to his chamber—and another small room, which opened into the kitchen; the old servant’s room, scrupulously clean, and furnished with a walnut chest of drawers and a bed like a nun’s with white hangings. “Do you think he has begun to make his liquor again?” asked Clotilde. “Well, it can be only that. You know that he thinks of neither eating nor drinking when that takes possession of him!” Then all the young girl’s vexation was exhaled in a low plaint: “Ah, my God! my God!” And while Martine went to make up her room, she took an umbrella from the hall stand and went disconsolately to eat her roll in the garden, not knowing now how she should occupy her time until midday. It was now almost seventeen years since Dr. Pascal, having resolved to leave his little house in the new town, had bought La Souleiade for twenty thousand francs, in order to live there in seclusion, and also to give more space and more happiness to the little girl sent him by his brother Saccard from Paris. This Souleiade, situated outside the town gates on a plateau dominating the plain, was part of a large estate whose once vast grounds were reduced to less than two hectares in consequence of successive sales, without counting that the construction of the railroad had taken away the last arable fields. The house itself had been half destroyed by a conflagration and only one of the two buildings remained—a quadrangular wing “of four walls,” as they say in Provence, with five front windows and roofed with large pink tiles. And the doctor, who had bought it completely furnished, had contented himself with repairing it and finishing the boundary walls, so as to be undisturbed in his house.