Jacques crossed the small garden at his rapid stride, and entered the dwelling. There, in the centre of the first room, a sort of large kitchen where the family took their meals and lived, Aunt Phasie, as he had called her from infancy, was alone, seated near the table on a rush-bottomed chair, with her legs wrapped in an old shawl. She was a cousin of his father, a Lantier, who had stood godmother to him; and who, when he was no more than six, had taken care of him, at the time when his father and mother had flown off to Paris, and there disappeared. He had then remained at Plassans, where, later on, he had followed the classes at the École des Arts et Métiers. He bore Aunt Phasie great gratitude, and was in the habit of saying that if he had made his way, it was entirely due to her. When he became a driver of the first class in the Western Railway Company, after passing a couple of years on the Orleans Railway, he had found his godmother married again to a level crossing gatekeeper named Misard, and exiled with the two daughters of her first marriage to this out-of-the-way place, called La Croix-de-Maufras. At the present time Aunt Phasie, although barely forty-five, and who formerly had been so tall and strong, looked sixty. Moreover, she had grown thin and yellow, and was a prey to constant shivers. She welcomed Jacques with joy. "What! is it you, Jacques?" she exclaimed. "Ah! my bonny lad, what a surprise!" He kissed her cheeks, explaining that he had suddenly come into a couple of days' enforced holiday. La Lison, his engine, on reaching Havre in the morning, had broken its connecting-rod; and as the repairs would take four-and-twenty hours, he would not resume duty until the following evening for the 6.40 express. So he had come over to see her. He would sleep there, and catch the 7.26 train from Barentin in the morning. And he kept her poor, withered hands in his own, telling her how anxious her last letter had made him. "Ah! yes, my lad, I am not well, I am not at all well. How nice of you to have guessed my desire to see you! But I know what little time you have of your own, and did not dare ask you to run over. Anyhow, here you are, and I have so much, so much on my mind!" She broke off to cast a timid glance out of the window. On the other side of the metals, in the twilight, her husband could be perceived in his box, one of those wooden huts erected every four or five miles along the line, and connected by telegraph to ensure the satisfactory running of the trains. While his wife, and, later on, Flore, had been placed in charge of the gate at the level crossing, Misard had been made a watchman of the line. In fear of him hearing her, she lowered her voice, and said with a shudder: "I verily believe he is poisoning me!"