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about it.
    'How is Gina?'
    'She does her best.'
    'Not too upset?'
    'Why?'
    'Marcel is being tried next week.'
    'Which Marcel?'
    'The one in the hold-up. It's her boy friend.'
    She actually had to stay away for a few days and when she came back to resume work, it was a long time before she opened her mouth.
    That had been nearly three years ago now. A year after she had joined him as a housemaid Jonas married her, surprised at what was happening to him. He was thirty-eight and she twenty-two. Even when, in the sunlight, her body almost naked under her dress, she used to move to and fro around him and he breathed her smell, he had never made a single ambiguous gesture.
    At Le Bouc's they had adopted the habit of asking him, with a smile at the corner of the mouth: 'Well, well! And how's Gina?' He would reply, naively: 'She's very well.'
    Some of them went so far as to give him a wink, which he would pretend not to see, and others seemed to suspect him of keeping something up his sleeve.
    By keeping his ears pricked and asking a few questions here and there, he could easily have found out the names of all the lovers Gina had had since she had begun to knock about with men at the age of thirteen. He could also have found out about what had happened between her and Marcel. He was not unaware that she had been questioned several times by the police in the course of the inquiry and that Angèle had been summoned by the magistrate.
    What would be the use? It was not in his character. He had always lived alone, without imagining that he would one day be able to live otherwise.
    Gina did not keep house as well as old Leonie. Her tablecloths, when she took the trouble to use them, were seldom clean and, if she sometimes sang as she worked, there were days when her face remained set, her mouth truculent.
    Often, in the middle of the morning, she would disappear on the pretext of doing some shopping up the road and come back, with no apology, two hours later.
    Even so, hadn't her presence in the house become essential to Jonas? Had there been a conspiracy, as some people claimed, to force his hand?
    One afternoon Angèle had called in the clothes she always wore during the day in her shop, for she only really dressed up on Sundays. 'Well now, Jonas!'
    She was one of the few people not to call him Monsieur Jonas. True, she addressed most of the customers in the most familiar manner.
    'Don't touch those pears, love!' she would shout at Doctor Martroux's wife, one of the most prim and proper women in the town. 'When I go to see your husband I don't play with his instruments.' That day she strode into the kitchen and sat down on a chair, 'I've come to tell you I've had an offer for my daughter.'
     
    Her gaze made an inventory of the room, where nothing can have escaped her attention.
    'Some people from Paris who have just settled in the town. The husband, an engineer, has been appointed assistant manager of the factory and they are looking for someone. It's a good post, and Gina would get board and lodging. I promised them a reply the day after tomorrow. You can think it over.'
    He had had twenty-four hours of panic and had turned the question over in his mind in all its aspects again and again.... As a bachelor he couldn't have a living-in maid. Besides there was only one bedroom in the house. That Angèle knew. So why had she come to offer him a sort of first refusal?
    It was difficult enough to keep Gina in the house all day for she would have nothing to do for hours on end.
    Had Angèle thought of all this?
    During all this time Gina seemed to be unaware of what was going on and behaved in her normal way.
    They always had lunch together, in the kitchen, opposite one another, she with her back to the oven, from where she reached for the pots as she needed them, without having to get up.
    'Gina!'
    'Yes.'
    'There s something I want to ask you.'
    'What?'
    'You promise to answer me frankly?'
    He could still see her clearly as he pronounced