When the street-door clanged behind him, Balthazar caught his wife round the waist, and put an end to the uneasiness his feigned reverie was causing her by whispering in her ear,—­

“I knew how to get rid of him.”

Madame Claes turned her face to her husband, not ashamed to let him see the tears of happiness that filled her eyes:  then she rested her forehead against his shoulder and let little Jean slide to the floor.

“Let us go back into the parlor,” she said, after a pause.

Balthazar was exuberantly gay throughout the evening.  He invented games for the children, and played with such zest himself that he did not notice two or three short absences made by his wife.  About half-past nine, when Jean had gone to bed, Marguerite returned to the parlor after helping her sister Felicie to undress, and found her mother seated in the deep armchair, and her father holding his wife’s hand as he talked to her.  The young girl feared to disturb them, and was about to retire without speaking, when Madame Claes caught sight of her, and said:—­

“Come in, Marguerite; come here, dear child.”  She drew her down, kissed her tenderly on the forehead, and said, “Carry your book into your own room; but do not sit up too late.”

“Good-night, my darling daughter,” said Balthazar.

Marguerite kissed her father and mother and went away.  Husband and wife remained alone for some minutes without speaking, watching the last glimmer of the twilight as it faded from the trees in the garden, whose outlines were scarcely discernible through the gathering darkness.  When night had almost fallen, Balthazar said to his wife in a voice of emotion,—­

“Let us go upstairs.”

Long before English manners and customs had consecrated the wife’s chamber as a sacred spot, that of a Flemish woman was impenetrable.  The good housewives of the Low Countries did not make it a symbol of virtue.  It was to them a habit contracted from childhood, a domestic superstition, rendering the bedroom a delightful sanctuary of tender feelings, where simplicity blended with all that was most sweet and sacred in social life.  Any woman in Madame Claes’s position would have wished to gather about her the elegances of life, but Josephine had done so with exquisite taste, knowing well how great an influence the aspect of our surroundings exerts upon the feelings of others.  To a pretty creature it would have been mere luxury, to her it was a necessity.  No one better understood the meaning of the saying, “A pretty woman is self-created,”—­a maxim which guided every action of Napoleon’s first wife, and often made her false; whereas Madame Claes was ever natural and true.