Young Cuche got up from the bench in his turn. His feet were bare; indeed, the only clothes he wore were some old breeches and a ragged shirt, through which showed parts of his skin, browned by the sun and torn by brambles. He was to be met running about the high-roads, leaping over hedges with the agility of a wolf, living like a savage, to whom hunger makes every sort of prey acceptable. He had reached the lowest depths of misery and destitution, such an abyss of wretchedness that Pauline looked at him with remorse, as though she felt guilty for allowing a human being to go on living in such a state. But whenever she had attempted to rescue him, he had always fled, hating all thought of work or service. 'Since you have come here again,' she said to him gently, 'I suppose you have thought over what I said to you last Saturday. I hope that your return here is a sign that you are not lost to all sense of what is right. You cannot go on leading your present vagabond life; I am no longer as rich as I was, and I cannot support you in idleness. Have you made up your mind to accept my offer?' Since the loss of her fortune Pauline had tried to make up for her lack of money by interesting other charitable people in her pensioners. Doctor Cazenove had at last succeeded in obtaining the admission of Cuche's mother into the hospital for incurables at Bayeux, and Pauline herself held in reserve a sum of one hundred francs to provide an outfit for the son, for whom she had found a berth among the workmen employed on the railway line to Cherbourg. He bent his head as she spoke, and listened to her with an expression of distrust. 'It's quite settled, isn't it?' she continued. 'You will accompany your mother, and then you will go to your post.' But as she stepped towards him he sprang back. His eyes, though downcast, never left her, and he seemed to think that she was going to seize him by his wrists. 'What is the matter?' she asked in surprise. Then, with a wild animal's uneasy glance, the lad murmured: 'You are going to take me and shut me up. I don't want to go.' All further attempts at persuasion were useless. He let her continue talking, and appeared to admit the force of her reasoning; but as soon as ever she moved he sprang towards the gate, and with an obstinate shake of the head refused her offers for his mother and for himself, preferring freedom and starvation. 'Take yourself off, you lazy impostor!' Chanteau cried at last in indignation. 'It is kindness thrown away, troubling one's self about such a vagabond.' Pauline's hands trembled as she thought of her wasted charity, her failure to effect anything for this lad, who insisted on remaining in misery. 'No, no! uncle,' she said, with an expression of despairing tolerance, 'they are starving, and they must have some food in spite of everything.' She called Cuche back to her to give him, as on other Saturdays, a loaf of bread and forty sous. But he backed away from her, saying: