In the evening in summer he took his little girl with him and led her to the cemetery.  They came back at nightfall, when the only light left in the Place was that in Binet’s window.

The voluptuousness of his grief was, however, incomplete, for he had no one near him to share it, and he paid visits to Madame Lefrancois to be able to speak of her.

But the landlady only listened with half an ear, having troubles like himself.  For Lheureux had at last established the “Favorites du Commerce,” and Hivert, who enjoyed a great reputation for doing errands, insisted on a rise of wages, and was threatening to go over “to the opposition shop.”

One day when he had gone to the market at Argueil to sell his horse—­his last resource—­he met Rodolphe.

They both turned pale when they caught sight of one another.  Rodolphe, who had only sent his card, first stammered some apologies, then grew bolder, and even pushed his assurance (it was in the month of August and very hot) to the length of inviting him to have a bottle of beer at the public-house.

Leaning on the table opposite him, he chewed his cigar as he talked, and Charles was lost in reverie at this face that she had loved.  He seemed to see again something of her in it.  It was a marvel to him.  He would have liked to have been this man.

The other went on talking agriculture, cattle, pasturage, filling out with banal phrases all the gaps where an allusion might slip in.  Charles was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed it, and he followed the succession of memories that crossed his face.  This gradually grew redder; the nostrils throbbed fast, the lips quivered.  There was at last a moment when Charles, full of a sombre fury, fixed his eyes on Rodolphe, who, in something of fear, stopped talking.  But soon the same look of weary lassitude came back to his face.

“I don’t blame you,” he said.

Rodolphe was dumb.  And Charles, his head in his hands, went on in a broken voice, and with the resigned accent of infinite sorrow—­

“No, I don’t blame you now.”

He even added a fine phrase, the only one he ever made—­

“It is the fault of fatality!”

Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand from a man in his position, comic even, and a little mean.

The next day Charles went to sit down on the seat in the arbour.  Rays of light were straying through the trellis, the vine leaves threw their shadows on the sand, the jasmines perfumed the air, the heavens were blue, Spanish flies buzzed round the lilies in bloom, and Charles was suffocating like a youth beneath the vague love influences that filled his aching heart.

At seven o’clock little Berthe, who had not seen him all the afternoon, went to fetch him to dinner.

His head was thrown back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth open, and in his hand was a long tress of black hair.