“I’m very much obliged to you, indeed I am,” said the butter dealer.  “If ever I get rich, you shall not find yourself forgotten.”

The old maid still lingered in the stall.  Taking up a Bondon, she turned it round, and put it down on the slab again.  Then she asked its price.

“To me!” she added, with a smile.

“Oh, nothing to you,” replied Madame Lecoeur.  “I’ll make you a present of it.”  And again she exclaimed:  “Ah, if I were only rich!”

Mademoiselle Saget thereupon told her that some day or other she would be rich.  The Bondon had already disappeared within the old maid’s bag.  And now the butter dealer returned to the cellar, while Mademoiselle Saget escorted La Sarriette back to her stall.  On reaching it they talked for a moment or two about Monsieur Jules.  The fruits around them diffused a fresh scent of summer.

“It smells much nicer here than at your aunt’s,” said the old maid.  “I felt quite ill a little time ago.  I can’t think how she manages to exist there.  But here it’s very sweet and pleasant.  It makes you look quite rosy, my dear.”

La Sarriette began to laugh, for she was fond of compliments.  Then she served a lady with a pound of mirabelle plums, telling her that they were as sweet as sugar.

“I should like to buy some of those mirabelles too,” murmured Mademoiselle Saget, when the lady had gone away; “only I want so few.  A lone woman, you know.”

“Take a handful of them,” exclaimed the pretty brunette.  “That won’t ruin me.  Send Jules back to me if you see him, will you?  You’ll most likely find him smoking his cigar on the first bench to the right as you turn out of the covered way.”

Mademoiselle Saget distended her fingers as widely as possible in order to take a handful of mirabelles, which joined the Bondon in the bag.  Then she pretended to leave the market, but in reality made a detour by one of the covered ways, thinking, as she walked slowly along, that the mirabelles and Bondon would not make a very substantial dinner.  When she was unable, during her afternoon perambulations, to wheedle stallkeepers into filling her bag for her, she was reduced to dining off the merest scraps.  So she now slyly made her way back to the butter pavilions, where, on the side of the Rue Berger, at the back of the offices of the oyster salesmen, there were some stalls at which cooked meat was sold.  Every morning little closed box-like carts, lined with zinc and furnished with ventilators, drew up in front of the larger Parisian kitchens and carried away the leavings of the restaurants, the embassies, and State Ministries.  These leavings were conveyed to the market cellars and there sorted.  By nine o’clock plates of food were displayed for sale at prices ranging from three to five sous, their contents comprising slices of meat, scraps of game, heads and tails of fishes, bits of galantine, stray vegetables, and, by way of dessert, cakes scarcely cut into, and other