Looking back afterwards, it seemed to Therese as if that soft July day had been her last day of liberty; Octavie and Adolphe became terrible taskmasters. The weather changed, it grew hot, sultry, oppressive; she used to sit in the stuffy little room at Rue St Servan and gasp for a breath of fresh air. "Adolphe, must you be all day about your theme?" she would ask, a little too impatiently perhaps; and then Octavie would hold her disagreeable little head in the air and reply, "Mamma does not like you to correct Adolphe, mademoiselle." She was not patient at all in these days. She hated the lessons and the eternal mendings, and all the petty humiliations madame visited upon her, enduring them only as alternatives for worse things. There must come a day of escape, she thought; but her hope was beginning to grow restless and feverish. Every morning she got up thinking something must be heard of Fabien that day, and every day the weight in her heart became heavier. She could not understand it. She was still so childish in some things that she thought the good things must come, the hard go away; I think she pictured Fabien as a kind of beautiful fairy prince, at whose appearance Madame Roulleau and Monsieur Deshoulieres, and the terrible children, and the great heaps of worn-out clothes, would die away out of her life. She painted her own future in these colours until it seemed absolutely to belong to her. But, although when misgivings of its certainty obtruded themselves, she rebelled against them, I am inclined to think that misgivings came more frequently as the weeks went on. After all, the mending was not so bad as the teaching. The clothes were a burden, but they could not contradict her or make disagreeable remarks like Octavie, or have Adolphe's fits of obstinate sulkiness. She was not patient, as I have said, but she might have pleaded a certain amount of excuse when she had but the choice of being called cross by the children or remiss by their mother. Octavie--who was dressed in the extreme of fashion, and had a sallow face, high strongly-marked eyebrows, black eyes, and hair drawn up into a number of little curls at the back of her head--kept a sharp look-out for poor Therese's short-comings. "Mamma does not think Adolphe has improved in his writing;" "Mamma expects that you will see that our rooms are always in order, mademoiselle." When Therese could not smile at these speeches they hurt her terribly.