But Madame Braux, dumbfounded, did not comprehend; she answered in an undertone:

‘It’s your telegram that brought us. We thought it was the end.’

Her husband, behind her, pinched her to make her stop talking.

He added, with a malicious smile hidden in his thick beard:

‘It’s really nice of you to have asked us. We’ve come immediately,’ making an allusion in this way to the hostility that long had reigned between the two households. Then, as the old lady got to the last steps, he came forward briskly and rubbed against her cheeks the hairy mat which covered his face, and shouted in her ear, because of her deafness:

‘Feeling all right, mother? always fit, eh?’

Madame Braux, in her amazement at seeing alive the woman she had expected to find dead, did not even dare to kiss her: and her enormous stomach encumbered all the landing, preventing the others from advancing.

The old lady, uneasy and suspicious, but still without a word, looked at all those people round her: and her little grey eye, hard and scrutinizing, fixed now on one, now on another, full of easily read thoughts that disturbed her children.

Caravan said, by way of explanation:

‘She has been rather ill, but she’s all right now, absolutely all right, aren’t you, mother?’

Then the old lady, beginning to move again, answered in her broken, as it were far-away, voice:

‘It was a swoon: I heard you all the time.’

An embarrassed silence followed; they went into the dining-room; they sat down to a hurriedly improvised dinner.

Monsieur Braux alone had kept his self-possession. His naughty monkey face grimaced, and he launched sentences with a double meaning that visibly disturbed everybody.

But every minute the vestibule bell rang: and Rosalie, all bewildered, came to fetch Caravan, who threw away his napkin, and jumped up.

His brother-in-law even asked him if this was his at-home day. He stammered:

‘No, messages, nothing at all.’

Then, as a parcel was brought in, he stupidly opened it, and the invitations to the funeral, black-edged, appeared. Then, reddening up to his eyes, he shut the envelope, and covered it up with his waistcoat.

His mother had not seen it: she was obstinately looking at her clock, whose gilded cup-and-ball was swaying on the mantel-piece. And embarrassment grew amidst an icy silence.

Then the old woman, turning her wrinkled witch’s face to her daughter, said, with a flicker of malice in her eyes.

‘On Monday, you will bring your little girl! I want to see her.’

Madame Braux, her face lit up, cried: ‘Yes, mamma,’ while Madame Caravan the younger turned pale and faint with anguish.