The shock was too violent for nerves as weak as hers. The mental upheaval of that week of agony possessed her with an idea that hitherto had only hovered about her--the idea of suicide. She began to listen, with her head in her hands, to the voice that spoke to her of deliverance. She opened her ears to the sweet music of death that we hear in the background of life like the fall of mighty waters in the distance, dying away in space. The temptations that speak to the discouraged heart of the things that put an end to life so quickly and so easily, of the means of quelling suffering with the hand, pursued and solicited her. Her glance rested wistfully upon all the things about her that could cure the disease called life. She accustomed her fingers and her lips to them. She touched them, handled them, drew them near to her. She sought to test her courage upon them and to obtain a foretaste of death. She would remain for hours at her kitchen window with her eyes fixed on the pavements in the courtyard down at the foot of the five flights--pavements that she knew and could have distinguished from others! As the daylight faded she would lean farther out bending almost double over the ill-secured window-bar, hoping always that it would give way and drag her down with it--praying that she might die without having to make the desperate, voluntary leap into space to which she no longer felt equal. "Why, you'll fall out!" said mademoiselle one day, grasping her skirt impulsively in her alarm. "What are you looking at down there in the courtyard?" "Oh! nothing--the pavements." "In Heaven's name, are you crazy? How you frightened me!" "Oh! people don't fall that way," said Germinie in a strange tone. "I tell you, mademoiselle, in order to fall one must have a mighty longing to do it!" LI Germinie had not been able to induce Gautruche, who was haunted by a former mistress, to give her the key to his room. When he had not returned she was obliged to await his coming outside, in the cold, dark street.