Towards five o'clock the door was roughly pushed open, and Buteau appeared, followed by Jean. Immediately he saw Hyacinthe, he cried:
"I'd have wagered five francs. Don't you care a damn for anybody? We're waiting for you."
The drunkard, slobbering and merry, replied:
"That's a good 'un! I'm waiting for you. You've kept us hanging about since morning, and I think it cool of you to complain."
Buteau had stopped at La Borderie, where Jacqueline, whom, at the age of fifteen, he had knocked head over heels in the hay, had kept him to eat some hot buttered toast with Jean. Farmer Hourdequin having gone to breakfast at Cloyes after mass, the two sparks had kept it up pretty late, and had only just reached the village in each other's company.
Meantime, Bécu yelled out that he would pay for the five quarts, but that the game was to stand over; while Hyacinthe, reluctantly unfixing himself from his chair, followed his brother, chuckling to himself, with his eyes swimming in mildness.
"Wait there," said Buteau to Jean, "and in half an hour come and pick me up. You know you dine with me at father's."
When the two brothers had entered the sitting-room of the Fouans' house, they found the company assembled in full. The father was standing up with bent head. The mother, seated near the table in the middle, was mechanically knitting. Opposite her was Grosbois, who had eaten and drunk so much as to be in a state of doze, with his eyes half-open; while, farther off, Fanny and Delhomme were waiting patiently on two low chairs. There were some unwonted articles in the smoky room, with its shabby old furniture and its utensils worn by scrubbing: a blank sheet of paper, an ink-bottle, and a pen stood on the table beside the surveyor's hat—a monumental, rusty-black hat with which he had trudged through rain and sunshine for ten years past. Night was falling, and through the narrow window came an expiring, murky glimmer, in which the flat brim and urn-like body of the hat loomed strangely.
Grosbois, always ready for business in spite of his intoxication, woke up and stammered out: