"Ah!" he exclaimed. "Who is it?"
"Henri, you know, the headguard!" said she.
"Henri! Ah!" he exclaimed again.
"And this morning," she continued, "his two sisters arrived. It is they that you hear; they laugh at everything. As he is much better they are going back again to-night, on account of their father who cannot do without them; and Henri is to remain two or three days longer to get quite well. Just fancy, he leapt from the train without breaking a single bone; only he was like an idiot; but his reason has returned."
Jacques made no remark, but he fixed such a penetrating look on her, that she added:
"You understand, eh? If he was not there, people might gossip about us two. So long as I am not alone with you, my husband can say nothing and I have a good pretext for remaining here. You understand?"
"Yes, yes," he replied; "that is all right."
And Jacques, until evening, listened to the laughter of the little Dauvergnes, which he recollected having heard in Paris, ascending in the same manner from the lower floor into the room where Séverine had made her confession to him. With darkness came silence, and he could only distinguish the light footsteps of Séverine going from him to the other wounded man. The door below closed, and the house fell into profound silence. Feeling thirsty, he had to knock twice on the floor with a chair for her to come up to him. When she arrived, she was all smiles and very assiduous, explaining that she could not get away before because it was necessary to keep a compress of cold water on the head of Henri.
On the fourth day, Jacques was able to get up, and pass a couple of hours in an armchair before the window. By bending forward a little he could see the strip of garden inclosed by a low wall and invaded by briars with their pale bloom, a slice of which had been taken by the railway. And he remembered the night when he stood on tiptoe to look over the wall. He again saw the rather large piece of ground at the back of the house shut in by a hedge only, the hedge he had gone through to run up against Flore seated at the entrance to the dilapidated greenhouse, cutting up stolen cord with scissors. Ah! that abominable night full of the terror of his complaint! That Flore, with the tall, supple stature of a fair warrior woman, her flaming eyes fixed straight on his, was ever present since the recollection of it all returned to him more and more distinctly.
At first he had not opened his lips respecting the accident, and no one about him alluded to it, out of prudence. But every detail came back to him, and he pieced it all together again. He thought of nothing else, and his mind was so continuously occupied with the subject, that now, at the window, his sole occupation consisted in looking for traces of the collision, in watching for the actors in the catastrophe. How was it that he did not see Flore there at her post as gatekeeper with her flag in her fist? He dared not ask the question, and this increased the uneasiness he felt in this lugubrious dwelling, which seemed to him to be peopled with spectres.