rom 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 Leon!"

"Leon?"

"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 at cards at
the chemist's, and the walk to the nurse's, the reading in the arbour,
_tete-a-tete_ 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, wh