The yard door reopened, old Amable again presented himself. As soon as he had come in, he looked round on every side with the air of an old dog on the scent. He was in search of Victor Lecoq. As he did not see him, he took the candle off the table, and approached the dark niche in which his son had died. In the interior of it he perceived the man lying under the bed clothes and already asleep. Then the deaf man noiselessly turned round, put back the candle, and went out into the yard. Celeste had finished her work. She put her son into his bed, arranged everything, and waited her father-in-law's return before lying down herself beside Victor. She remained sitting on a chair, without moving her hands, and with her eyes fixed on vacancy. As he did not come back she murmured in a tone of impatience and annoyance: "This good-for-nothing old man will burn four sous' worth of candle on us." Victor answered her from under the bed clothes. "'Tis over an hour since he went out. We'd want to see whether he fell asleep on the bench before the door." She declared: "I'm going there." She rose up, took the light, and went out, making a shade of her hand in order to see through the darkness. She saw nothing in front of the door, nothing on the bench, nothing on the dung pit, where the old man used sometimes to sit in hot weather. But, just as she was on the point of going in again, she chanced to raise her eyes towards the big apple tree, which sheltered the entrance to the farm house, and suddenly she saw two feet belonging to a man who was hanging at the height of her face. She uttered terrible cries: "Victor! Victor! Victor!" He ran out in his shirt. She could not utter another word, and turning round her head, so as not to see, she pointed towards the tree with her outstretched arm. Not understanding what she meant, he took the candle in order to find out, and in the midst of the foliage lit up from below, he saw old Amable hanged high up by the neck with a stable-halter. A ladder was fixed at the trunk of the apple tree. Victor rushed to look for a bill-hook, climbed up the tree, and cut the halter. But the old man was already cold, and he put out his tongue horribly with a frightful grimace. MAGNETISM It was at the close of a dinner-party of men, at the hour of endless cigars and incessant sips of brandy, amidst the smoke and the torpid warmth of digestion and the slight confusion of heads generated by such a quantity of eatables and by the absorption of so many different liquors.