She was not sure that his exit was really inevitable--not yet.
When Jean Jacques saw Virginie standing beside the table in his office where he lead worked over so many years, now marked Sold, and waiting to be taken away by its new owner, he started and drew back, but she held out her hand and said: "But one word, M'sieu' Jean Jacques; only one word from a friend--indeed a friend." "A friend of friends," he answered, still in abstraction, his eyes having that burnished light which belonged to the night of the fire; but yet realizing that she was a sympathetic soul who had offered to lend him money without security.
"Oh, indeed yes, as good a friend as you can ever have!" she added.
Something had waked the bigger part of her, which had never been awake in the days of Palass Poucette.

Jean Jacques was much older than she, but what she felt had nothing to do with age, or place or station.

It had only to do with understanding, with the call of nature and of a motherhood crying for expression.

Her heart ached for him.
"Well, good-bye, my friend," he said, and held out his hand.

"I must be going now." "Wait," she said, and there was something insistent and yet pleading in her voice.