It was no easy matter to come through the excited crowd, but Dangeau's height told, and with Aline's head against his shoulder he pushed doggedly in the wake of Goyot, who made his way through the press with a wonderful agility. Down the steps now, and inch by inch forward through the jostling excited people. Up a by way at last, and then sharp to the left where a carriage waited, and with that Goyot gave a gasp of relief, and mopped a dripping brow.
"Eh, mon Dieu!" he said; "get in, get in!"
The carriage had mouldy straw on the floor, and the musty odour of it mounted in the hot air.
Dangeau complained of it sharply.
"A devil of a smell, this, Goyot!" and the little surgeon fixed him with keen, watchful eyes, as he nodded acquiescence.
What house they came to, or how they came to it, Dangeau knew no more than his unconscious wife. She lay across his breast, white and still as the dead, and when he laid her down on the bed in the upper room they reached at last, she fell limply from his grasp, and he turned to Goyot with a groan.
A soft, white-haired woman, dark-eyed and placid,—afterwards he knew her for Goyot's housekeeper,—tried to turn him out of the room, but he would go no farther than the window, where he sat staring, staring at the houses across the way, watching them darken in the gathering dusk, and mechanically counting the lights that presently sprang into view.
Behind him Marie Carlier came and went, at Goyot's shortly worded orders, until at last Dangeau's straining ears caught the sound of a faint, fluttering sigh. He turned then, the lights in the room dancing before his burning eyes. For a moment the room seemed full of the small tongues of flame, and then beyond them he saw his wife's eyes open again, whilst her hand moved in feeble protest against the draught which Goyot himself was holding to her lips.
Dangeau got up, stood a moment gazing, and then stumbled from the room and broke into heavy sobbing. Presently Goyot brought him something in a glass, which he drank obediently.
"Now you will sleep," said the little man in cheerful accents, and sleep he did, and never stirred until the high sun struck across his face and waked him to France's new day, and his.