try, especially now that she had to look
after the farm almost alone. As the room was chilly, she shivered as she
ate. This showed something of her full lips, that she had a habit of
biting when silent.

Her neck stood out from a white turned-down collar. Her hair, whose two
black folds seemed each of a single piece, so smooth were they, was
parted in the middle by a delicate line that curved slightly with the
curve of the head; and, just showing the tip of the ear, it was joined
behind in a thick chignon, with a wavy movement at the temples that the
country doctor saw now for the first time in his life. The upper part of
her cheek was rose-colored. She had, like a man, thrust in between two
buttons of her bodice a tortoise-shell eyeglass.

When Charles, after bidding farewell to old Rouault, returned to the
room before leaving, he found her standing, her forehead against the
window, looking into the garden, where the bean props had been knocked
down by the wind. She turned round.

"Are you looking for anything?" she asked.

"My whip, if you please," he answered.

He began rummaging on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It
had fallen to the floor, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle
Emma saw it, and bent over the flour sacks. Charles, out of politeness,
made a dash also, and as he stretched out his arm, at the same moment
felt his breast brush against the back of the young girl bending beneath
him. She drew herself up, scarlet, and looked at him over her shoulder
as she handed him his whip.

Instead of returning to the Bertaux in three days as he had promised, he
went back the very next day, then regularly twice a week, without
counting the visits he paid now and then as if by accident.

Everything, moreover, went well; the patient progressed favorably; and
when, at the end of forty-six days, old Rouault was seen trying to walk
alone in his "den," Monsieur Bovary began to be looked upon as a man of
great capacity. Old Rouault said that he could not have been cured
better by the first doctor of Yvetot, or even of Rouen.

As to Charles, he did not stay to ask himself why it was a pleasure to
him to go to the Bertaux. Had he done so, he would, no doubt, have
attributed his zeal to the importance of the case, or perhaps to the
money he hoped to make by it. Was it for this, however, that his visits
to the farm formed a delightful exception to the meagre occupations of
his life? On these days he ro