The druggist was beginning to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared, Irma in her arms, Napoleon by her side, and Athalie following.  She sat down on the velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube box near her papa.  The latter was filling funnels and corking phials, sticking on labels, making up parcels.  Around him all were silent; only from time to time, were heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low words from the chemist giving directions to his pupil.

“And how’s the little woman?” suddenly asked Madame Homais.

“Silence!” exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in his waste-book.

“Why didn’t you bring her?” she went on in a low voice.

“Hush! hush!” said Emma, pointing with her finger to the druggist.

But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over his bill, had probably heard nothing.  At last he went out.  Then Emma, relieved, uttered a deep sigh.

“How hard you are breathing!” said Madame Homais.

“Well, you see, it’s rather warm,” she replied.

So the next day they talked over how to arrange their rendezvous.  Emma wanted to bribe her servant with a present, but it would be better to find some safe house at Yonville.  Rodolphe promised to look for one.

All through the winter, three or four times a week, in the dead of night he came to the garden.  Emma had on purpose taken away the key of the gate, which Charles thought lost.

To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters.  She jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop.  She was wild with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled him out at the window.  At last she would begin to undress, then take up a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her.  But Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too.

“Come, now, Emma,” he said, “it is time.”

“Yes, I am coming,” she answered.

Then, as the candles dazzled him; he turned to the wall and fell asleep.  She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed.  Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm round her waist, he drew her without a word to the end of the garden.

It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly Leon had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings.  She never thought of him now.

The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches.  Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds.  Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them.  The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied vibrations.