As Balthazar entered at last through the panelled door, the expression of his face seemed to her more dreadful, more absorbed, more distracted than she had yet seen it.  When he made her no answer she was magnetized for a moment by the fixity of that blank look emptied of all expression, by the consuming ideas that issued as if distilled from that bald brow.  Under the shock of this impression she wished to die.  But when she heard the callous voice, uttering a scientific wish at the moment when her heart was breaking, her courage came back to her; she resolved to struggle with that awful power which had torn a lover from her arms, a father from her children, a fortune from their home, happiness from all.  And yet she could not repress a trepidation which made her quiver; in all her life no such solemn scene as this had taken place.  This dreadful moment—­did it not virtually contain her future, and gather within it all the past?

Weak and timid persons, or those whose excessive sensibility magnifies the smallest difficulties of life, men who tremble involuntarily before the masters of their fate, can now, one and all, conceive the rush of thoughts that crowded into the brain of this woman, and the feelings under the weight of which her heart was crushed as her husband slowly crossed the room towards the garden-door.  Most women know that agony of inward deliberation in which Madame Claes was writhing.  Even one whose heart has been tried by nothing worse than the declaration to a husband of some extravagance, or a debt to a dress-maker, will understand how its pulses swell and quicken when the matter is one of life itself.

A beautiful or graceful woman might have thrown herself at her husband’s feet, might have called to her aid the attitudes of grief; but to Madame Claes the sense of physical defects only added to her fears.  When she saw Balthazar about to leave the room, her impulse was to spring towards him; then a cruel thought restrained her—­she should stand before him! would she not seem ridiculous in the eyes of a man no longer under the glamour of love—­who might see true?  She resolved to avoid all dangerous chances at so solemn a moment, and remained seated, saying in a clear voice,

“Balthazar.”

He turned mechanically and coughed; then, paying no attention to his wife, he walked to one of the little square boxes that are placed at intervals along the wainscoting of every room in Holland and Belgium, and spat in it.  This man, who took no thought of other persons, never forgot the inveterate habit of using those boxes.  To poor Josephine, unable to find a reason for this singularity, the constant care which her husband took of the furniture caused her at all times an unspeakable pang, but at this moment the pain was so violent that it put her beside herself and made her exclaim in a tone of impatience, which expressed her wounded feelings,—­

“Monsieur, I am speaking to you!”