During the week she saw shabbily-dressed idlers sauntering along the shore, men in broad-brimmed straw hats and flannel shirts, women who sat on the worn grass of the sloping bank, doing nothing, with the dreamy eyes of a cow at pasture.  All the peddlers, handorgans, harpists; travelling jugglers, stopped there as at a quarantine station.  The quay was crowded with them, and as they approached, the windows in the little houses near by were always thrown open, disclosing white dressing-jackets, half-buttoned, heads of dishevelled hair, and an occasional pipe, all watching these paltry strolling shows, as if with a sigh of regret for Paris, so near at hand.  It was a hideous and depressing sight.

The grass, which had hardly begun to grow, was already turning yellow beneath the feet of the crowd.  The dust was black; and yet, every Thursday, the cocotte aristocracy passed through on the way to the Casino, with a great show of rickety carriages and borrowed postilions.  All these things gave pleasure to that fanatical Parisian, Sidonie; and then, too, in her childhood, she had heard a great deal about Asnieres from the illustrious Delobelle, who would have liked to have, like so many of his profession, a little villa in those latitudes, a cozy nook in the country to which to return by the midnight train, after the play is done.

All these dreams of little Chebe, Sidonie Risler had realized.

The brothers went to the gate opening on the quay, in which the key was usually left.  They entered, making their way among trees and shrubs of recent growth.  Here and there the billiard-room, the gardener’s lodge, a little greenhouse, made their appearance, like the pieces of one of the Swiss chalets we give to children to play with; all very light and fragile, hardly more than resting on the ground, as if ready to fly away at the slightest breath of bankruptcy or caprice:  the villa of a cocotte or a pawnbroker.

Frantz looked about in some bewilderment.  In the distance, opening on a porch surrounded by vases of flowers, was the salon with its long blinds raised.  An American easy-chair, folding-chairs, a small table from which the coffee had not been removed, could be seen near the door.  Within they heard a succession of loud chords on the piano and the murmur of low voices.

“I tell you Sidonie will be surprised,” said honest Risler, walking softly on the gravel; “she doesn’t expect me until tonight.  She and Madame Dobson are practising together at this moment.”

Pushing the door open suddenly, he cried from the threshold in his loud, good-natured voice: 

“Guess whom I’ve brought.”

Madame Dobson, who was sitting alone at the piano, jumped up from her stool, and at the farther end of the grand salon Georges and Sidonie rose hastily behind the exotic plants that reared their heads above a table, of whose delicate, slender lines they seemed a prolongation.