He was quite calm. He arranged the bow of his tie before the looking-glass, put on his hat, and took himself off. She heard him double-lock the door, and remove the key. Night was drawing in more and more. For an instant she remained seated, her ear catching every sound outside. A continual, low whine came from the adjoining room in occupation of the newspaper woman: no doubt a little dog forgotten by its mistress. Below, in the apartment of the Dauvergnes, the piano had become silent. There was now a merry clatter of stewpans and crockery. The two little housekeepers were busy in their kitchen, Claire looking after a mutton stew, Sophie picking a salad. And Séverine, prostrated, listened to their laughter in the frightful distress of this falling night. At a quarter past six, the locomotive of the Havre express, issuing from the Pont de l'Europe, was switched on to its train and there secured. Owing to the metals being occupied, they had been unable to lodge this train under the marquee of the main lines. It waited in the open air beside a prolongation of the platform forming a sort of narrow jetty, in the gloom of an inky sky, where the poorly furnished row of gas lamps displayed but a line of smoky stars. A shower had just ceased, leaving behind a trace of icy dampness spread over this vast uncovered space, which the mist threw back as far as the pale glimmers on the façades in the Rue de Rome. This immense, dreary expanse, bathed in water, here and there studded with a gory light, was broken up by opaque lumps, engines, and solitary carriages, parts of trains in repose on the shunting lines. And from the depths of this sheet of darkness came sounds,--giant-like respirations, breathless with fever, whistles resembling the piercing shrieks of women, distant, lamentable blasts of horns mingled with a rumble in the adjoining streets. Orders were shouted out to add on a carriage. The engine of the express stood motionless, losing by a valve a great jet of steam, which ascended into all this obscurity to spread into small clouds and sprinkle the boundless veil of mourning drawn across the sky with white tears. At twenty minutes past six, Roubaud and Séverine appeared. She had just returned the key to Mother Victoire, as she passed by the lavatory, near the waiting-rooms. And Roubaud, impatient and blunt, his hat on the back of his head, urged her on, after the fashion of a husband with no time to lose, who is being delayed by his wife; while she, with her veil drawn tight over her face, advanced slowly as if broken down with fatigue.