ran to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water.

He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband, who was a mill-owner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was with her handkerchief wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement. At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath—

“Ma foi! I thought I should have had to stay there. There is such a crowd—such a crowd!”

He added—

“Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur Léon!”

“Léon?”

“Himself! He’s coming along to pay his respects.” And as he finished these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered the box.

He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and Madame Bovary extended hers, without doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will. She had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain fell upon the green leaves, and they had said good-bye standing at the window. But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a few hurried words.

“Ah, good-day! What! you here?”

“Silence!” cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning.

“So you are at Rouen?”

“Yes.”

“And since when?”

“Turn them out! turn them out!” People were looking at them. They were silent.

But from that moment she listened no more; and the chorus of the guests, the scene between Ashton and his servant, the grand duet in D major, all were for her as far off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous and the characters more remote. She remembered the games of cards at the druggist‘s, and the walk to the nurse’s, the reading in the arbour, the tête-à-tête by the fireside—all that poor love, so calm and so protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless forgotten. And why had he come back? What combination of circumstances had brought him back into her life? He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair.

“Does this amuse you?” he said, bending over her so closely that the end of his moustache brushed her cheek. She replied carelessly—

“Oh, dear me, no, not much.”

Then he proposed that they should leave the theatre and go and take an ice somewhere.

“Oh, not yet; let us stay,” said Bovary. “Her hair’s undone; this is going to be tragic.”

But the mad scene did not at all interest Emma, and the acting of the singer seemed to her exaggerated.

“She screams too loud,” said she, turning to Charles, who was listening.

“Yes—perhaps—a little,” he replied, undecided between the frankness of his pleasure and his respect for his wife’s opinion.

Then with a sigh Léon said—

“The heat is—”

“Unbearable! Yes!”

“Do you feel unwell?” asked Bovary.

“Yes, I am stifling; let us go.”

Monsieur Léon put her long lace shawl carefully about her shoulders, and all three went off to sit down in the harbour, in the open air, outside the windows of a café.

First they spoke of her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles from time to time, for fear, she said, of boring Monsieur Leon; and the latter told them that he had come to spend two years at Rouen in a large office, in order to get practice in his profession, which was different in Normandy and Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe, the Homais, Mere Lefrançois, and as they had, in the husband’s presence, nothing more to say to one another, the conversation soon came to an end.

People coming out of the theatre passed along the pavement, humming or shouting at the top of their voices, “O bel ange, ma Lucie!” Then Léon, playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tamburini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them, Lagardy, despite his grand outbursts, was nowhere.

“Yet,” interrupted Charles, who was slowly sipping his rum-sherbet, “they say that he is quite admirable in the last act. I regret leaving before the end, because it was beginning to amuse me.”

“Why,” said the clerk, “he will soon give another performance.”

But