Page:The Master of the House (Hall).djvu/27



workshop was a long, low vault of a place dependent for light upon its arched entrance. A small door at the back led into the house, but the entrance gave direct onto the street, and here Jóusè would work half in and half out whenever his job permitted of this, for he dearly loved the fresh air and the sunshine. Spitting upon the rough palms of his hands he would pause to exchange the time of day or some crude but harmless joke with a neighbour, and as likely as not, from across the street, Eusebe would start to make jokes of his own which, it must be admitted, were seldom quite harmless.

Jóusè had an apprentice, one Anfos by name, a youth of seventeen who was simple-minded. He was tall and robust and his lips and cheeks were already well covered with straggling black hair, for Anfos was too childish to handle a razor. His brown eyes were like those of Mirèio, the bitch, apologetic and slightly bewildered. In body a man for more than three years, his mind still dwelt in the pastures of childhood, but at times this mind of ms realized vaguely that all was not well any more with those pastures, that something wider might stretch just beyond, and then his brown eyes would look slightly bewildered.

Anfos was a distant cousin of Marie's whom Jóusè had taken on out of pity a few weeks after Christophe's Rh