“How is that—you have lost your dog?”
“Yes. He was just a year old. He had never been outside the shop. I wanted to take him to have a run in the woods. He had never seen the grass nor the leaves and he was almost wild. He began to run about and bark and he disappeared in the wood. I must also add that he was greatly afraid of the train. That may have driven him mad. I kept on calling him, but he has not come back. He will die of hunger in there.”
Without turning towards her husband, the young woman said:
“If you had left his chain on, it would not have happened. When people are as stupid as you are they do not keep a dog.”
“But, my dear, it was you—” he murmured timidly.
She stopped short, and looking into his eyes as if she were going to tear them out, she began again to cast in his face innumerable reproaches.
It was growing dark. The cloud of vapor that covers the country at dusk was slowly rising and there was a poetry in the air, induced by the peculiar and enchanting freshness of the atmosphere that one feels in the woods at nightfall.
Suddenly the young man stopped, and feeling his body feverishly, exclaimed:
“Oh, I think that I—”
She looked at him.