He was about to sit down to table when he stumbled against Euphrasie’s chair.  She sat watching him with an anxious, semi-stupefied expression.  “There you are, in my way as usual!” said he; “one is always tumbling up against you.  Come, make a little room, do.”

He did not seem to be a very terrible customer, but at the sound of his voice she began to tremble, full of childish fear, as if she were threatened with a thrashing.  And this time she found strength enough to drag her chair as far as a dark closet, the door of which was open.  She there sought refuge, ensconcing herself in the gloom, amid which one could vaguely espy her shrunken, wrinkled face, which suggested that of some very old great-grandmother, who was taking years and years to die.

Mathieu’s heart contracted as he observed that senile terror, that shivering obedience on the part of a woman whose harsh, dry, aggressively quarrelsome disposition he so well remembered.  Industrious, self-willed, full of life as she had once been, she was now but a limp human rag.  And yet her case was recorded in medical annals as one of the renowned Gaude’s great miracles of cure.  Ah! how truly had Boutan spoken in saying that people ought to wait to see the real results of those victorious operations which were sapping the vitality of France.

Cecile, however, with eager affection, kissed the three children, who somehow continued to grow up in that wrecked household.  Tears came to her eyes, and directly Madame Joseph had given her back the work-materials entrusted to Euphrasie she hurried Mathieu away.  And, as they reached the street, she said:  “Thank you, Monsieur Froment; I can go home on foot now—.  How frightful, eh?  Ah! as I told you, we shall be in Paradise, Norine and I, in the quiet room which you have so kindly promised to rent for us.”

On reaching Beauchene’s establishment Mathieu immediately repaired to the workshops, but he could obtain no precise information respecting his threshing-machine, though he had ordered it several months previously.  He was told that the master’s son, Monsieur Maurice, had gone out on business, and that nobody could give him an answer, particularly as the master himself had not put in an appearance at the works that week.  He learnt, however, that Beauchene had returned from a journey that very day, and must be indoors with his wife.  Accordingly, he resolved to call at the house, less on account of the threshing-machine than to decide a matter of great interest to him, that of the entry of one of his twin sons, Blaise, into the establishment.

This big fellow had lately left college, and although he had only completed his nineteenth year, he was on the point of marrying a portionless young girl, Charlotte Desvignes, for whom he had conceived a romantic attachment ever since childhood.  His parents, seeing in this match a renewal of their own former loving improvidence, had felt moved, and unwilling to drive the lad to despair.  But, if he was to marry, some employment must first be found for him.  Fortunately this could be managed.  While Denis, the other of the twins, entered a technical school, Beauchene, by way of showing his esteem for the increasing fortune of his good cousins, as he now called the Froments, cordially offered to give Blaise a situation at his establishment.