Madame Faujas, who was generally so completely mistress of herself, could not suppress a slight show of confusion as she stammered a word or two of reply. For some moments they stood confronting and scrutinising each other in the hall. Mouret had hurriedly mounted the steps and Rose had taken up her position at the kitchen door.
'You must be very glad to be together again,' said Marthe, addressing Madame Faujas.
Then, noticing the feeling of embarrassment which was keeping them all silent, she turned towards Trouche and added:
'You arrived by the five o'clock train, I suppose? How long were you in getting here from Besançon?'
'Seventeen hours in the train,' Trouche replied, opening a toothless mouth. 'It is no joke that, in a third-class carriage, I can tell you. One gets pretty well shaken up inside.'
Then he laughed with a peculiar clattering of his jaws. Madame Faujas cast a very angry glance at him, and he began to fumble mechanically at his greasy overcoat, trying to fasten a button that was no longer there, and pressing to his thighs (doubtless in order to hide some stains) a couple of cardboard bonnet-boxes which he was carrying, one green and the other yellow. His red throat was perpetually gurgling beneath a twisted, ragged black neckcloth, over which appeared the edge of a dirty shirt. In his wrinkled face, which seemed to reek with vice, there glistened two little black eyes that rolled about incessantly, examining everybody and everything with an expression of astonishment and covetousness. They looked like the eyes of a thief studying a house to which he means to return in order to plunder it some night.
Mouret fancied that Trouche was examining the fastenings.
'That fellow,' he thought to himself, 'looks as though he were getting the patterns of the locks into his head!'
Olympe was conscious that her husband had made a vulgar remark. She was a tall, slight woman, fair and faded, with a flat plain face. She carried a little deal box and a big bundle tied up in a tablecloth.