He could not hide the sort of gay and sarcastic feeling of content that filled his whole being and he walked up and down the terrace, stamping his feet as hard as he could on the ground. But, suddenly going to his wife, he seized her by the arm and said, in a hollow voice: "Would you like to know what I really think?" "Yes." "Well, all this will lead to trouble." "No," said the old lady, quietly. "How do you mean, no?" "We've been married five-and-thirty years; and, for five-and-thirty years, you've told me, week after week, that we shall have trouble. So, you see...." She turned away from him and went back to the drawing-room again, where she began to dust the furniture with a feather-broom. He shrugged his shoulders, as he followed her indoors: "Oh, yes, you're the placid mother, of course! Nothing excites you. As long as your cupboards are tidy, your linen all complete and your jams potted, you don't care!... Still, you ought not to forget that they killed your poor father." "I don't forget it ... only, what's the good? It's more than forty years ago...." "It was yesterday," he said, sinking his voice, "yesterday, no longer ago than yesterday...." "Ah, there's the postman!" she said, hurrying to change the conversation. She heard a heavy footstep outside the windows opening on the garden. There was a rap at the knocker on the front-door. A minute later, Victor, the man-servant, brought in the letters. "Oh!" said Mme. Morestal. "A letter from the boy.... Open it, will you? I haven't my spectacles.... I expect it's to say that he will arrive this evening: he was to have left Paris this morning." "Not at all!" cried M. Morestal, glancing over the letter. "Philippe and his wife have taken their two boys to some friends at Versailles and started with the intention of sleeping last night at the Ballon de Colnard, seeing the sunrise and doing the rest of the journey on foot, with their knapsacks on their backs. They will be here by twelve." She at once lost her head: "And the storm! What about last night's storm?" "My son doesn't care about the storm! It won't be the first that the fellow's been through. It's eleven o'clock. He will be with us in an hour." "But that will never do! There's nothing ready for them!" She at once went to work, like the active little old woman that she was, a little too fat, a little tired, but wide-awake still and so methodical, so orderly in her ways that she never made a superfluous movement or one that was not calculated to bring her an immediate advantage.