She had been staying with her father, just outside the little town, while the case had been under investigation, but she had, of course, often made this journey; on the previous occasions, however, she had been intent upon the necessity for giving her husband an exact account of what had happened, and her mind was full of Duros’ last words of advice, as she had got into the carriage, on the answers Monsieur Desqueyroux was to make when he was again questioned. Thérèse had then felt no distress or awkwardness at finding herself face to face once more with the sick man: what they had to consider was not what had really happened, but what they had better say, or not say. Husband and wife had never been so closely united as they were by the preparation of this defence,--drawn together across the infant body of their little daughter Marie. They concocted, for the judge’s benefit, a simple and coherent story, calculated to convince that logical mind. She used to get into the same carriage that was waiting for her this evening: but to-night she dreaded the end of that journey through the darkness which in those days she had found so tedious. She remembered how, the moment she got into the carriage, she longed to be back in that room at Argelouse, and she used to go over in her mind the instructions she was to pass on to her husband: he was to be sure, for instance, to say that she had told him one evening about that prescription which an unknown man had asked her to take to the chemist’s, on the pretext that he did not like to go himself because he owed money there,--but Duros did not advise that Bernard should go so far as to pretend that he remembered remonstrating with his wife for doing such a foolish thing. Now that the nightmare had been exorcised, what would Bernard and Thérèse talk about that evening? She saw in her mind’s eye the desolate house in which he was awaiting her: she pictured the bed in the centre of that stone-floored room, and the lamp, turned low, standing on a table among a litter of newspapers and medicine bottles. The house-dogs, awakened by the noise of the carriage, bark and are quiet: and then the silence would descend once more, the awful silence of those nights when the wretched Bernard lay racked by frightful paroxysms of vomiting. Thérèse tried to imagine the first moment, not far distant now, when their eyes would meet; and then the ensuing night, the next day, the day after, and the weeks to come, in that house at Argelouse, where they would no longer need to compose a presentable version of the drama they had lived. There would be nothing now between them,--except what had really been there, really, and in very truth. Thérèse lost her nerve, and stammered, turning towards the lawyer,--though her words were intended for the older man: “I expect to stay a few days with Monsieur Desqueyroux, and then, if he goes on improving, I shall come back to my father.”