her mother, she would, like her, wear large straw hats in the summer-time; from a distance they would be taken for two sisters.  He pictured her to himself working in the evening by their side beneath the light of the lamp; she would embroider him slippers; she would look after the house; she would fill all the home with her charm and her gaiety.  At last, they would think of her marriage; they would find her some good young fellow with a steady business; he would make her happy; this would last for ever.

Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while he dozed off by her side she awakened to other dreams.

To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a new land, whence they would return no more.  They went on and on, their arms entwined, without a word.  Often from the top of a mountain there suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, on whose pointed steeples were storks’ nests.  They went at a walking-pace because of the great flag-stones, and on the ground there were bouquets of flowers, offered you by women dressed in red bodices.  They heard the chiming of bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur of guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled beneath playing waters.  And then, one night they came to a fishing village, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliffs and in front of the huts.  It was there that they would stay; they would live in a low, flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a gulf, by the sea.  They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and their existence would be easy and large as their silk gowns, warm and star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate.  However, in the immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing special stood forth; the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonised, azure, and bathed in sunshine.  But the child began to cough in her cot or Bovary snored more loudly, and Emma did not fall asleep till morning, when the dawn whitened the windows, and when little Justin was already in the square taking down the shutters of the chemist’s shop.

She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had said to him—­

“I want a cloak—­a large lined cloak with a deep collar.”

“You are going on a journey?” he asked.

“No; but—­never mind.  I may count on you, may I not, and quickly?”

He bowed.

“Besides, I shall want,” she went on, “a trunk—­not too heavy—­handy.”

“Yes, yes, I understand.  About three feet by a foot and a half, as they are being made just now.”

“And a travelling bag.”

“Decidedly,” thought Lheureux, “there’s a row on here.”

“And,” said Madame Bovary, taking her watch from her belt, “take this; you can pay yourself out of it.”