For a moment Geneviève remained embarrassed. She did not dare to confess her anxiety at the thought that something had seemed to be detaching her from her husband that evening, in the atmosphere of devout hostility in which she lived at her grandmother's. She had felt indeed as if the ideas and feelings of her girlhood were returning and clashing with the life which she led as wife and mother. But all that was merely the faint touch of the past, and her gaiety and confidence soon returned amid Marc's caresses. Near her, in the cradle, she could hear the gentle and regular breathing of her little Louise. 'You are right,' she said. 'Let us stay--and do your duty as you understand it. We love each other too well to be otherwise than happy, always.' III From that time forward, in order to avoid painful quarrels; nothing more was said of the Affaire Simon in the ladies' little house. At meals they spoke merely of the fine weather, as if they were a thousand leagues from Maillebois, where the popular passions raged more and more tempestuously, old friends of thirty years' standing, and even relatives quarrelling, threatening one another and exchanging blows. Marc, who in the home of Geneviève's family displayed such silence and lack of interest, became elsewhere one of the most ardent combatants, an heroic worker in the cause of truth and justice. On the evening of the day when Simon was arrested he had persuaded his colleague's wife to seek an asylum with her parents, the Lehmanns, those tailors who dwelt in a little dark house of the Rue du Trou. It was holiday-time, the school was closed; and, besides, Mignot the assistant-master, remained to guard the building--that is, when he was not fishing in the Verpille. Moreover, Mademoiselle Rouzaire, who wished to take part in the affair, in which her evidence was likely to prove important, had also remained at her post, renouncing on this occasion the holiday visit which she usually paid to an aunt dwelling at a distance. Thus Madame Simon, leaving her furniture behind, in order that folk might not regard her departure as terrified flight and a tacit acknowledgment of guilt, had taken Joseph and Sarah to the Rue du Trou, with a single trunk of clothes, as if she merely intended to stay with her parents for a few weeks.