When we came out of the church it was not far off four o’clock.  The rain had not stopped and little rivers dashed down from either side of the procession’s sluggish flow along the street.  There were many flowers, so that the hearse made a blot of relief, beautiful enough.  There were many people, too, and I turned round several times.  Always I saw old Eudo, in his black cowl, hopping along in the mud, hunchbacked as a crow.  Marie was walking among some women in the second half of the file, whose frail and streaming roof the hearse drew along irregularly with jerks and halts.  Her gait was jaded; she was thinking only of our sorrow!  All things darkened again to my eyes in the ugliness of the evening.

The cemetery is full of mud under the muslin of fallen rain, and the footfalls make a sticky sound in it.  There are a few trees, naked and paralyzed.  The sky is marshy and sprinkled with crows.

The coffin, with its shapeless human form, is lowered from the hearse and disappears in the fresh earth.

They march past.  Marie and her father take their places beside me.  I say thanks to every one in the same tone; they are all like each other, with their gestures of impotence, their dejected faces, the words they get ready and pour out as they pass before me, and their dark costume.  No one has come from the castle, but in spite of that there are many people and they all converge upon me.  I pluck up courage.

Monsieur Lucien Gozlan comes forward, calls me “my dear sir,” and brings me the condolences of his uncles, while the rest watch us.

Joseph Boneas says “my dear friend” to me, and that affects me deeply.  Monsieur Pocard says, “If I had been advised in time I would have said a few words.  It is regrettable——­”

Others follow; then nothing more is to be seen in the rain, the wind and the gloom but backs.

“It’s finished.  Let’s go.”

Marie lifts to me her sorrow-laved face.  She is sweet; she is affectionate; she is unhappy; but she does not love me.

We go away in disorder, along by the trees whose skeletons the winter has blackened.

When we arrive in our quarter, twilight has invaded the streets.  We hear gusts of talk about the Pocard scheme.  Ah, how fiercely people live and seek success!

Little Antoinette, cautiously feeling her way by a big wall, hears us pass.  She stops and would look if she could.  We espy her figure in that twilight of which she is beginning to make a part, though fine and faint as a pistil.

“Poor little angel!” says a woman, as she goes by.

Marie and her father are the only ones left near me when we pass Rampaille’s tavern.  Some men who were at the funeral are sitting at tables there, black-clad.

We reach my home; Marie offers me her hand, and we hesitate.  “Come in.”

She enters.  We look at the dead room; the floor is wet, and the wind blows through as if we were out of doors.  Both of us are crying, and she says, “I will come to-morrow and tidy up.  Till then——­”