“Let’s spoil the paint for them.”
“Shut up. They’re in bed. You are interfering with the embrace.”
“You there, is she nice to cuddle?”
“When is the baby expected?”
They roared with laughter, and then Philipon loomed up like a big ship in the starlight.
“Allez! Keep your snouts out of our village. We have sticks ready.”
The choir oscillated, swayed, and seemed inclined to wind itself in a spiral about the smith, but when Philipon rapped the stone wall of the path with the iron bar that he had been carrying these rowdies thought it wiser to laugh.
“Hallo, there goes the dinner-gong.”
“All right, sergeant-major.”
“And there is madame, too!”