"Four hundred and forty." "Good I you are a clever girl." The girl looked boldly at her father, and said, as she pointed to the shoes on her feet,-- "It is possible that I am a clever girl; but I say that I will not put on those shoes again; in the first place, on account of my health, and secondly, for the sake of decency. I know nothing more annoying than shoes which are too big for you, and go ghi, ghi, ghi, along the road. I would sooner be barefooted." "You are right," the father replied, in a gentle voice, which contrasted with the girl's rudeness; "but the poor are not admitted into churches unless they wear shoes; God's presence must not be entered barefoot," he added bitterly. Then he returned to the object that occupied him. "And so you are sure that he will come?" "He is at my heels," she replied. The man drew himself up, and there was a species of illumination on his face. "Wife," he cried, "you hear! Here is the philanthropist; put out the fire." The stupefied mother did not stir, but the father, with the agility of a mountebank, seized the cracked pot, which stood on the chimney-piece, and threw water on the logs. Then he said to his elder daughter,-- "Pull the straw out of the chair." As his daughter did not understand him, he seized the chair and kicked the seat out; his leg passed through it, and while drawing it out, he asked the girl,-- "Is it cold?" "Very cold; it is snowing." The father turned to the younger girl, who was on the bed near the window, and shouted in a thundering voice,-- "Come off the bed directly, idler; you never will do anything: break a pane of glass!" The little girl jumped off the bed, shivering. "Break a pane!" he continued. The girl was quite stunned, and did not move. "Do you hear me?" the father repeated; "I tell you to break a pane." The child, with a sort of terrified obedience, stood on tip-toe and broke a pane with her fist; the glass fell with a great crash. "All right!" said the father. He was serious and active, and his eye rapidly surveyed every corner of the garret; he was like a general who makes his final preparations at the moment when an action is about to begin. The mother, who had not yet said a word, rose and asked in a slow, dull voice, the words seeming to issue as if frozen,-- "Darling, what do you intend to do?" "Go to bed!" the man replied. The tone admitted of no deliberation, the mother obeyed, and threw herself heavily on one of the beds. A sobbing was now audible in a corner. "What is that?" the father cried. The younger girl, without leaving the gloom in which she was crouching, showed her bleeding hand. In breaking the glass she had cut herself; she had crawled close to her mother's bed, and was now crying silently. It was the mother's turn to draw herself up and cry:-- "You see what nonsensical acts you commit! She has cut herself in breaking the window." "All the better," said the man; "I expected it."