"Oh! my poor Flore!" he sighed. "It is only what one might have expected for a long time, but it is hard all the same. Then she is there. I will go and look at her, for we should have ended by agreeing, but for this misfortune." He walked slowly with her to the house, but on the threshold he cast a glance towards his horses. In one sentence she set his mind at rest. "There is no fear of them moving," she said. "And, besides, the express is a long way off." She lied. Her experienced ear had just caught, in the gentle rustle of the country, the sound of the express leaving Barentin station. Another five minutes, and it would be there. It would issue from the cutting at a hundred yards from the level crossing. While the quarryman stood in the room of the dead woman, feeling very much affected, with his thoughts adverting to Louisette and oblivious of everything else, Flore remained outside, in front of the window, listening to the distant regular puffing of the engine as it approached nearer and nearer. Suddenly she remembered Misard: he would see her, he would prevent her; and she felt a pang in the chest when, turning round, she could not perceive him in his box. But she discovered him on the other side of the house, digging up the ground at the foot of the masonry round the well, unable to overcome his searching mania, and doubtless all at once taken with the conviction that the hoard must be there. Entirely absorbed by his blind, sullen passion, he searched, searched. And this was her last excitation. Events themselves urged her on. One of the horses began to neigh, while the locomotive, at the other end of the cutting, puffed very loudly, like a person hastening along in a hurry. "I'll go and keep them quiet," said Flore to Cabuche. "Don't be afraid." She sprang forward, grasped the leader of the team by the bit, and pulled with all her strapping strength of a wrestler. The horses strained. For an instant the dray, heavy with its enormous load, oscillated without advancing; but, as if she had harnessed herself to it like an extra animal, it at last moved and came across the line. It was right on the rails as the express, a hundred yards away, issued from the cutting. Then to stop the dray, lest it should pass over, she arrested the further progress of the team with a sudden jerk requiring a superhuman effort that made her joints crack. She who, it will be remembered, had her legend, of whom people related extraordinary feats of strength--the truck shooting down an incline, which she had brought to a standstill as it ran, the cart she had pushed across the metals, and thus saved from a train--she accomplished this action now. In her iron grip she held back those five horses, rearing and neighing with the instinct of peril.