On the fourth day, Jacques was able to get up, and pass a couple of hours in an armchair before the window. By bending forward a little he could see the strip of garden inclosed by a low wall and invaded by briars with their pale bloom, a slice of which had been taken by the railway. And he remembered the night when he stood on tiptoe to look over the wall. He again saw the rather large piece of ground at the back of the house shut in by a hedge only, the hedge he had gone through to run up against Flore seated at the entrance to the dilapidated greenhouse, cutting up stolen cord with scissors. Ah! that abominable night full of the terror of his complaint! That Flore, with the tall, supple stature of a fair warrior woman, her flaming eyes fixed straight on his, was ever present since the recollection of it all returned to him more and more distinctly. At first he had not opened his lips respecting the accident, and no one about him alluded to it, out of prudence. But every detail came back to him, and he pieced it all together again. He thought of nothing else, and his mind was so continuously occupied with the subject, that now, at the window, his sole occupation consisted in looking for traces of the collision, in watching for the actors in the catastrophe. How was it that he did not see Flore there at her post as gatekeeper with her flag in her fist? He dared not ask the question, and this increased the uneasiness he felt in this lugubrious dwelling, which seemed to him to be peopled with spectres. Nevertheless, one morning, when Cabuche was there assisting Séverine, he ended by making up his mind. "And where is Flore?" he inquired. "Is she ill?" The quarryman, taken unawares, misunderstood a gesture the young woman made, and, thinking she was telling him to speak out, he answered: "Poor Flore is dead." Jacques looked at them shuddering, and it then became necessary to tell him all. Together they related to him the suicide of the young girl, how she had been cut in two in the tunnel. The burial of the mother had been delayed until the evening, so that her daughter might be carried away at the same time; and they now slept side by side in the little cemetery at Doinville, where they had gone to join the first who had made the journey, the younger sister, that gentle but unfortunate Louisette. Three miserable creatures among those who fall on the road, who are crushed and disappear, as if swept away by the terrible blast of those passing trains. "Dead! great God!" repeated Jacques very lowly. "My poor Aunt Phasie, and Flore, and Louisette!"