He and Ya-Bon lunched in the neighborhood, strolled along the avenue, without losing sight of the hospital, and called there at half-past one.
Patrice at once saw old Siméon, sitting at the end of a covered yard where the soldiers used to meet. His head was half wrapped up in the usual comforter; and, with his big yellow spectacles on his nose, he sat smoking his pipe on the chair which he always occupied.
As for Coralie, she was in one of the rooms allotted to her on the first floor, seated by the bedside of a patient whose hand she held between her own. The man was asleep.
Coralie appeared to Patrice to be very tired. The dark rings round her eyes and the unusual pallor of her cheeks bore witness to her fatigue.
“Poor child!” he thought. “All those blackguards will be the death of you.”
He now understood, when he remembered the scenes of the night before, why Coralie kept her private life secret and endeavored, at least to the little world of the hospital, to be merely the kind sister whom people call by her Christian name. Suspecting the web of crime with which she was surrounded, she dropped her husband’s name and told nobody where she lived. And so well was she protected by the defenses set up by her modesty and determination that Patrice dared not go to her and stood rooted to the threshold.
“Yet surely,” he said to himself, as he looked at Coralie without being seen by her, “I’m not going to send her in my card!”
He was making up his mind to enter, when a woman who had come up the stairs, talking loudly as she went, called out:
“Where is madame? . . . M. Siméon, she must come at once!”
Old Siméon, who had climbed the stairs with her, pointed to where Coralie sat at the far end of the room; and the woman rushed in. She said a few words to Coralie, who seemed upset and at once, ran to the door, passing in front of Patrice, and down the stairs, followed by Siméon and the woman.