"My trunk! Bring it down! And get the carriage ready, Victor, do you hear? At once!..." Mme. Morestal appeared, attracted by the noise. Dr. Borel was with her. "What's the matter, Marthe? What is it?" "I refuse to stay here another hour!" retorted Marthe, heedless of the presence of the doctor and the servants. "You can choose between Suzanne and me...." "My husband promised ..." "Very well. As you choose that woman, I am going." She opened the drawers of the chest and flung the dresses and linen out promiscuously. With an abrupt movement, she pulled the cloth from the table. All the knicknacks fell to the floor. Dr. Borel tried to argue with her: "This is all very well, but where are you going?" "To Paris. My boys will come to me there." "But haven't you seen the papers? The position is growing more serious every hour. The frontier-corps are being mobilized. Are you sure of getting through?" "I am going," she said. "And suppose you don't reach Paris?" "I am going," she repeated. "What about Philippe?" She shrugged her shoulders. He understood that nothing mattered to her, neither her husband's existence nor the threat of war, and that there was no fighting against her despair. Nevertheless, as he went away with Mme. Morestal, he said, loud enough for Marthe to hear: "By the way, don't be uneasy about Philippe. He has been to see me and to enquire after his father. He will come back. I promised to let him know how things were going...." When Victor came, at seven o'clock, to say that the carriage was ready, Marthe had changed her mind. The thought that Philippe was hanging about the neighbourhood, that he might return to the house, that Suzanne and he would stay under the same roof and see each other as and when they pleased was more than she could bear. She remained, therefore, but standing behind her door, with her ears pricked up to catch the first sound. When everybody had gone to bed, she went downstairs and hid herself, until break of day, in a recess in the entrance-hall. She was prepared to spring out at the least creak on the stair, for she felt convinced that Suzanne would slip out in the dark with the object of joining Philippe. This time, Marthe would have killed her. And her jealousy was so exasperated that she lay in wait, not with fear, but with the fierce hope that Suzanne was really going to appear before her. Fits such as these, which are abnormal in a woman like Marthe, who, at ordinary times, obeyed her reason more readily than her instinct, fits such as these do not last. Marthe ended by suddenly bursting into sobs. After crying for a long time, she went up to her room and, worn out with fatigue, got into bed. * * *