yes, mother, we have been
waiting for you."

And with an alacrity, unusual in him, he took her arm, while Mdme.
Caravan, the younger, seized the candle and lighted them downstairs,
walking backwards in front of them, step by step, just as she had
done the previous night, in front of her husband, who was carrying the
marble.

On reaching the first floor, she ran up against people who were
ascending. It was the Charenton family, Mdme. Braux, followed by her
husband.

The wife, tall, fleshy, with a dropsical stomach which threw her trunk
far out behind her, opened wide her astonished eyes, ready to take
flight. The husband, a shoemaker socialist, a little hairy man, the
perfect image of a monkey, murmured, quite unconcerned: "Well, what next?
Is she resurrected?"

As soon as Mdme. Caravan recognized them, she made despairing signs to
them, then, speaking aloud, she said: "Mercy! How do you mean!... Look
there! What a happy surprise!"

But Mdme. Braux, dumbfounded, understood nothing; she responded in a low
voice: "It was your dispatch which made us come; we believed it was all
over."

Her husband, who was behind her, pinched her to make her keep silent. He
added with a malignant laugh, which his thick beard concealed: "It was
very kind of you to invite us here. We set out in post haste."--which
remark showed clearly the hostility which had for a long time reigned
between the households. Then, just as the old woman had arrived at
the last steps, he pushed forward quickly and rubbed against her cheeks
the hair which covered his face, bawling out in her ear, on account of
her deafness: "How well you look, mother; sturdy as usual, hey!"

Mdme. Braux, in her stupor at seeing the old woman whom they all believed
to be dead, dared not even embrace her; and her enormous belly blocked up
the passage and hindered the others from advancing. The old woman, uneasy
and suspicious, but without speaking, looked at everyone around her; and
her little gray eyes, piercing and hard, fixed themselves now on the one
and now on the other, and they were so terrible in their expression that
the children became frightened.

Caravan, to explain matters, said: "She has been somewhat ill, but she is
better now; quite well, indeed, are you not, mother?"

Then the good woman, stopping in her walk, responded in a husky voice,
as though it came from a distance: "It was syncope. I heard you all the
while."

An embarrassing silence followed. T