little _salon_, with its polished floor, its red curtains, its mirror, its timepiece; in the kitchen, where Veuve Angelin also slept, little pots and pans were simmering and bubbling over tiny hollows filled with charcoal, scooped out of the brick arched stove--before the doctor and little Roulleau, the notary, came round the corner with excited faces, eagerly talking as they walked. "Man's folly is never so apparent as in his last moments," the doctor was saying cynically, as they turned in from the square, and began to mount the bare, uncarpeted staircase. Veuve Angelin, standing at the top, caught the words with a certain grim satisfaction. "So he is dead, after all, in spite of that old woman's obstinacy," she said volubly. "I knew it from the first: what one sees one sees, and what one hears one hears, and nobody can make it different. But as for those creatures, bah! They are _imbecilles_, know-nothings: one might as well waste one's breath upon a stone wall. Monsieur has no doubt just come from the Cygne?" "Hold your tongue, Marie," answered the doctor, shortly; "get us something to eat, and do not kill my patients beforehand." "Something has vexed him," reflected Marie, vanishing promptly. "Do what one will for their comfort, those men are always ungrateful." She would have made up for his want of communicativeness by listening to the conversation as the two drank _vin ordinaire_, and munched radishes, but M. Deshoulieres was exasperatingly silent. Two or three times the notary glanced at him as if about to speak, but checked himself. He looked troubled, gloomy, abstracted. The companions were very different in appearance; M. Deshoulieres, unlike the conventional type of his countrymen, largely built, with a massive head, a quantity of short light hair, and thick moustaches, warmer in tint than his hair. He had blue eyes, very blue, well-opened and quick; a finely shaped mouth; over all a grave expression which somewhat alarmed people. I ought perhaps to say, alarmed people who were well, the sick could never understand their previous fears. He made enemies for himself by his want of sympathy for imaginary complaints, he was too straightforward and truth-telling ever to be entirely popular; but he had a little kingdom of his own where he reigned triumphantly,--a sad little kingdom, perhaps, one in which he was always fighting, helping, cheering,--out of which had grown the grave expression, the abruptness of which others complained, but one which had also its tributes and its victories and its satisfactions, and which was dear to the man's good heart. In his ears there sounded, it is true, a never-ending din of murmurs, suffering, feeble moans: to balance these, there were glad, grateful looks, patient thanks, a lighting up of faces at his step. Such a life needs compensations, and he found them. He might come away, as I have said, grave and absorbed; but he rarely looked as he looked when he sat