“But, my dear friend, it was you—­” he murmured.

She did not allow him to finish his sentence.

“It was I!  Ah, it is my fault now!  Was it I who wanted to go out without getting any information, pretending that I knew how to find my way?  Was it I who wanted to take the road to the right on top of the hill, insisting that I recognized the road?  Was it I who undertook to take charge of Cachou—­”

She had not finished speaking when her husband, as if he had suddenly gone crazy, gave a piercing scream, a long, wild cry that could not be described in any language, but which sounded like ‘tuituit’.

The young woman did not appear to be surprised or moved and resumed: 

“No, really, some people are so stupid and they pretend they know everything.  Was it I who took the train to Dieppe last year instead of the train to Havre—­tell me, was it I?  Was it I who bet that M. Letourneur lived in Rue des Martyres?  Was it I who would not believe that Celeste was a thief?”

She went on, furious, with a surprising flow of language, accumulating the most varied, the most unexpected and the most overwhelming accusations drawn from the intimate relations of their daily life, reproaching her husband for all his actions, all his ideas, all his habits, all his enterprises, all his efforts, for his life from the time of their marriage up to the present time.

He strove to check her, to calm her and stammered: 

“But, my dear, it is useless—­before monsieur.  We are making ourselves ridiculous.  This does not interest monsieur.”

And he cast mournful glances into the thicket as though he sought to sound its peaceful and mysterious depths, in order to flee thither, to escape and hide from all eyes, and from time to time he uttered a fresh scream, a prolonged and shrill “tuituit.”  I took this to be a nervous affection.

The young woman, suddenly turning towards me:  and changing her tone with singular rapidity, said: 

“If monsieur will kindly allow us, we will accompany him on the road, so as not to lose our way again, and be obliged, possibly, to sleep in the wood.”

I bowed.  She took my arm and began to talk about a thousand things —­about herself, her life, her family, her business.  They were glovers in the Rue, Saint-Lazare.

Her husband walked beside her, casting wild glances into the thick wood and screaming “tuituit” every few moments.

At last I inquired: 

“Why do you scream like that?”

“I have lost my poor dog,” he replied in a tone of discouragement and despair.

“How is that—­you have lost your dog?”

“Yes.  He was just a year old.  He had never been outside the shop.  I wanted to take him to have a run in the woods.  He had never seen the grass nor the leaves and he was almost wild.  He began to run about and bark and he disappeared in the wood.  I must also add that he was greatly afraid of the train.  That may have driven him mad.  I kept on calling him, but he has not come back.  He will die of hunger in there.”