content when he saw her:

"Ah, I'm glad!... I feel better already.... You won't leave me, will
you, my little Suzanne?"

And he fell asleep again almost at once, under the action of a fresh
injection of morphia.

As on the previous evening, the dining-room at the Old Mill remained
empty. The maid took a light meal on a tray to Mme. Morestal and, next,
to Marthe. But Marthe did not even answer her knock.

Marthe Morestal had not left her room during the morning; and all day
she stayed alone, with her door bolted and her shutters closed. She sat
on the edge of a chair and, bent in two, held her fists to her jaws and
clenched her teeth so as not to scream aloud. It would have done her
good to cry; and she sometimes thought that her suffering was about to
find an outlet in sobbing; but the relief of tears did not come to
moisten her eyes. And, stubbornly, viciously, she went over the whole
pitiful story, recalling Suzanne's stay in Paris, the excursions on
which Philippe used to take the young girl and from which they both
returned looking so happy and glad, their meeting at the Old Mill,
Philippe's departure for Saint-Elophe and, the next day, Suzanne's
strange attitude, her ambiguous questions, her spiteful smile, as of a
rival endeavouring to hurt the wife and hoping to supplant her. Oh, what
a cruel business! And how hateful and wicked life, once so sweet, now
seemed to her!

At six o'clock, driven by hunger, she went down to the dining-room. As
she came out, after eating a little bread and drinking a glass of water,
she saw Mme. Morestal going down the front-door steps to meet the
doctor. She then remembered that her father-in-law was ill and that she
had not yet seen him. His bedroom was close by. She crossed the passage,
knocked, heard a voice--the voice of a nurse, she thought--say "Come
in," and opened the door.

Opposite her, at a few steps' distance, beside the sleeping man, was
Suzanne.

"You! You!" fumed Marthe. "You here!..."

Suzanne began to tremble under her fixed gaze and stammered:

"It was your father-in-law.... He insisted.... The doctor came ..."

And, with her knees giving way beneath her, she said, over and over
again:

"I beg your pardon.... Forgive me ... forgive me.... It was my fault....
Philippe would never have ..."

Marthe at first listened without stirring. Perhaps she might have been
just able to restrain herself. But, at the name of Philippe, at the name
of Philippe uttered