Denise had often found Deloche waiting for her. As secondhand she had charge of the arrangements between her department and the work-room where only the models and alterations were done, and was always going up and down to give the necessary orders. He watched for her, inventing any pretext to run after her; then he affected to be surprised when he met her at the work-room door. She got to laugh about the matter, it became quite an understood thing. The corridor ran alongside the cistern, an enormous iron tank containing twelve thousand gallons of water; and there was another one of equal size on the roof, reached by an iron ladder. For an instant, Deloche would stand talking, leaning with one shoulder against the cistern in the continual abandonment of his long body, bent with fatigue. The noise of the water was heard, a mysterious noise of which the iron tank ever retained the musical vibration. Notwithstanding the deep silence, Denise would turn round anxiously, thinking she had seen a shadow pass on the bare, yellow-painted walls. But the window would soon attract them, they would lean out, and forget themselves in a pleasant gossip, in endless souvenirs of their native place. Below them, extended the immense glass roof of the central gallery, a lake of glass bounded by the distant housetops, like a rocky coast. Beyond, they saw nothing but the sky, a sheet of sky, which reflected in the sleeping water of the glazed work the flight of its clouds and the tender blue of its azure. It so happened that Deloche was speaking of Valognes that day. “I was six years old; my mother took me to Valognes market in a cart. You know it's ten miles away; we had to leave Bricquebec at five o'clock. It's a fine country down our way. Do you know it?” “Yes, yes,” replied Denise, slowly, her looks lost in the distance. “I was there once, but was very little then. Nice roads with grass on each side, aren't there? and now and again sheep browsing in couples, dragging their clog along by the rope.” She stopped, then resumed with a vague smile: “Our roads run as straight as an arrow for miles between rows of trees which afford a lot of shade. We have meadows surrounded with hedges taller than I am, where there are horses and cows feeding. We have a little river, and the water is very cold, under the brushwood, in a spot I know well.” “It is the same with us, exactly!” cried Deloche, delighted. “There's grass everywhere, each one encloses his plot with thorns and elms, and is at once at home; and it's quite green, a green far different to what we see in Paris. Dear me! what fun I've had at the bottom of the road, to the left, coming down from the mill!”