Jean laughed the most, throwing back his head and shouting. He was so tired and excited that he could not seem to stop. “You look so awful, Jo. You are so untidy and dirty and ugly,” he said.
“It’s good that I do look just this way, for no one will know me. Poor Flambeau, see how tired he is. If only he hadn’t come. But wasn’t he wonderful there at the inn?”
There was the sound of wheels coming the other way, and they looked up and saw that a coach was approaching. Flambeau ran toward it, and as he came up to it, started to bark. The driver of the coach stopped and looked at him, and then at Marie Josephine and Jean.
“You both look fagged out. If you’re going my way I’ll give you a lift,” he said.
They came up to the side of the coach, and as they stood there it seemed as though everything went round and round before Marie Josephine’s eyes.
“We are tired, and so is Flambeau,” she said faintly. Then she scrambled up somehow into the back of the coach, and Jean followed her.
“We are going to Melon and beyond toward Paris. I have cousins near Melon,” Jean said to the man, and this was true.
There was only one other passenger in the cart, a fat market woman who kept muttering to herself, and every now and then leaning over a wooden box at her feet and saying, “Hush your gab. You’ll squawk all the way to Paris, I know you will.” The very disagreeable noise of imprisoned hens answered her. Marie Josephine remembered feeling sorry for the hens, and then she knew nothing more, for she fell into the deepest sleep she had ever known.
She woke suddenly, sat bolt upright, and rubbed her eyes. When she had fallen asleep she had felt the sun on her face, but as she woke the soft glimmer of stars greeted her. Jean was awake. He sat up beside the driver of the coach, talking busily. It was Flambeau’s caress which had roused her. He was lying close beside her. The hens were quiet and the woman was asleep. The kind man who drove the coach was smoking a pipe. Outside in the dusk the good-night call of birds came to them drowsily.
“You have to be very still when you catch them or you will frighten them away,” Jean was saying. “I always let them go. They are such dear little things I always free them after just a little while.” He seemed to be having the best kind of a time sitting up there by the driver. Marie Josephine hoped he would be very careful what he said, he was such a little chatterbox.