ct. He
was suffering from cold feet. He felt as if he were about to succumb to
the dejection which was crushing him. The reverberation of his footsteps
vibrated through his brain.

When he saw by his watch that it was four o'clock, he experienced, as it
were, a sense of vertigo, a feeling of dismay. He tried to repeat some
verses to himself, to enter on a calculation, no matter of what sort, to
invent some kind of story. Impossible! He was beset by the image of
Madame Arnoux; he felt a longing to run in order to meet her. But what
road ought he to take so that they might not pass each other?

He went up to a messenger, put five francs into his hand, and ordered
him to go to the Rue de Paradis to Jacques Arnoux's residence to enquire
"if Madame were at home." Then he took up his post at the corner of the
Rue de la Ferme and of the Rue Tronchet, so as to be able to look down
both of them at the same time. On the boulevard, in the background of
the scene in front of him, confused masses of people were gliding past.
He could distinguish, every now and then, the aigrette of a dragoon or a
woman's hat; and he strained his eyes in the effort to recognise the
wearer. A child in rags, exhibiting a jack-in-the-box, asked him, with a
smile, for alms.

The man with the velvet vest reappeared. "The porter had not seen her
going out." What had kept her in? If she were ill he would have been
told about it. Was it a visitor? Nothing was easier than to say that she
was not at home. He struck his forehead.

"Ah! I am stupid! Of course, 'tis this political outbreak that prevented
her from coming!"

He was relieved by this apparently natural explanation. Then, suddenly:
"But her quarter of the city is quiet." And a horrible doubt seized hold
of his mind: "Suppose she was not coming at all, and merely gave me a
promise in order to get rid of me? No, no!" What had prevented her from
coming was, no doubt, some extraordinary mischance, one of those
occurrences that baffled all one's anticipations. In that case she would
have written to him.

And he sent the hotel errand-boy to his residence in the Rue Rumfort to
find out whether there happened to be a letter waiting for him there.

No letter had been brought. This absence of news reassured him.

He drew omens from the number of coins which he took up in his hand out
of his pocket by chance, from the physiognomies of the passers-by, and
from the colour of different horses; and when the