“What is it? Is the sugar-basin broken?”
“No, mamma. We don’t know.”
She turned round, looking for Adèle, when she beheld her listening at the door of the bed-room.
“Whatever are you doing?” cried she. “Everything is being smashed in your kitchen, and your’re there spying on your master. Yes, yes, one begins with prunes, and one ends with something else. For some time past, you have had a way about you which greatly displeases me; you smell of men, my girl——-”
The servant stood looking at her with wide-open eyes. At length she interrupted her.
“That’s not what’s the matter. I think master has fallen down in there.”
“Good heavens! she’s right,” said Berthe, turning pale, “it was just like some one falling.”
They entered the room. Monsieur Josserand, seized with a fainting fit, was lying on the floor before the bed; his head had come in contact with a chair, and a little stream of blood was issuing from the right ear. The mother, the two daughters and the servant surrounded and examined him. Berthe, alone, wept, again seized with the bitter sobs which the blow had called forth. And, when the four of them raised him to place him on the bed, they heard him murmur:
“It’s all over. They’ve killed me.”