“Ah!”

And that was all.

A quarter of an hour after he added, “My poor mother! what will become of her now?”

She made a gesture that signified she did not know.  Seeing her so taciturn, Charles imagined her much affected, and forced himself to say nothing, not to reawaken this sorrow which moved him.  And, shaking off his own—­

“Did you enjoy yourself yesterday?” he asked.

“Yes.”

When the cloth was removed, Bovary did not rise, nor did Emma; and as she looked at him, the monotony of the spectacle drove little by little all pity from her heart.  He seemed to her paltry, weak, a cipher—­in a word, a poor thing in every way.  How to get rid of him?  What an interminable evening!  Something stupefying like the fumes of opium seized her.

They heard in the passage the sharp noise of a wooden leg on the boards.  It was Hippolyte bringing back Emma’s luggage.  In order to put it down he described painfully a quarter of a circle with his stump.

“He doesn’t even remember any more about it,” she thought, looking at the poor devil, whose coarse red hair was wet with perspiration.

Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified reproach to his incurable incapacity.

“Hallo! you’ve a pretty bouquet,” he said, noticing Leon’s violets on the chimney.

“Yes,” she replied indifferently; “it’s a bouquet I bought just now from a beggar.”

Charles picked up the flowers, and freshening his eyes, red with tears, against them, smelt them delicately.

She took them quickly from his hand and put them in a glass of water.

The next day Madame Bovary senior arrived.  She and her son wept much.  Emma, on the pretext of giving orders, disappeared.  The following day they had a talk over the mourning.  They went and sat down with their workboxes by the waterside under the arbour.

Charles was thinking of his father, and was surprised to feel so much affection for this man, whom till then he had thought he cared little about.  Madame Bovary senior was thinking of her husband.  The worst days of the past seemed enviable to her.  All was forgotten beneath the instinctive regret of such a long habit, and from time to time whilst she sewed, a big tear rolled along her nose and hung suspended there a moment.  Emma was thinking that it was scarcely forty-eight hours since they had been together, far from the world, all in a frenzy of joy, and not having eyes enough to gaze upon each other.  She tried to recall the slightest details of that past day.  But the presence of her husband and mother-in-law worried her.  She would have liked to hear nothing, to see nothing, so as not to disturb the meditation on her love, that, do what she would, became lost in external sensations.