"I'll go and see if he's asleep," said Lise abruptly.
She lighted the candle, and then, making sure that Laure and Jules were soundly slumbering, she glided in her night-dress into the room where the beet-root was stored, and where the old man's iron bed had again been placed. When she came back she was shivering with cold, her feet half frozen by passing over the tiled floor. She buried herself beneath the bed-clothes, and pressed closely against her husband, who clasped her in his arms to warm her.
"Well?"
"Yes, he's asleep; but his breath's very faint, and his mouth is gaping open like a fish's."
They now both remained quiet for a time, but, in spite of their silence, they could read each other's thoughts. The old man seemed constantly on the point of choking, so it would be an easy matter to suffocate him altogether. A handkerchief, or even a hand, held over his mouth, and then they would be freed from him. And really it would be a kindness to the old man himself. He would be better off quietly asleep in the graveyard, than living on, a source of pain and discomfort to himself as well as others.
Buteau's and Lise's blood was flowing hotly, as though some burning desire had just thrilled them. Suddenly the former sprang out of the bed on to the tiled floor.
"I'll go and have a look at him, too," he said.
He then went off with the candle, which had been left standing on the edge of the chest of drawers, while Lise held her breath and listened, her eyes staring widely open in the dark. The minutes glided by, and no sound came from the adjoining room. After a time, however, she heard Buteau's feet pattering gently back again; he had left the light in the old man's room, and was so overcome with excitement that he could not prevent himself from panting. He stepped up to the bed, felt about in the dark for his wife, and then whispered in her ear:
"You come too! I daren't do it alone!"
Lise got up and followed her husband; both of them groping their way forwards with their hands to avoid coming into collision with anything. They no longer felt cold; even their night-dresses were too hot for them. The candle was standing on the floor, in a corner of the old man's room, but it afforded sufficient light for them to see him lying on his back. His head had fallen off the pillow, and he was lying there so rigidly, and looked so emaciated with age, that one might have thought he was already dead, had it not been for the struggling, painful breathing from his gaping mouth. His teeth had all gone, and his lips were turned inwards, round what merely looked like a black hole, a hole over which the husband and wife now stooped, as though they were trying to ascertain how much life still remained at the bottom of it. For a long time they stood looking at it, side by side, with their hips touching one another. Their arms felt limp and nerveless. It was such an easy and yet such a perilous matter to take something and stop up that black hole with it. They went away and then came back again. Their parched tongues could not have pronounced a single word; it was only their eyes that spoke. Lise pointed out the pillow to her husband with a glance. That would do. What was he waiting for? But Buteau's eyes blinked nervously, and he thrust his wife into his place. Then Lise, in her impatient irritation, suddenly seized the pillow, and clapped it down on the old man's face.