They heard in the passage the sharp noise of a wooden leg on the boards. It was Hippolyte bringing back Emma’s luggage. In order to put it down he described painfully a quarter of a circle with his stump.
“He doesn’t even remember any more about it,” she thought, looking at the poor devil, whose coarse red hair was wet with perspiration.
Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified reproach to his incurable incapacity.
“Hallo! you’ve a pretty bouquet,” he said, noticing Léon’s violets on the chimney.
“Yes,” she replied indifferently; “it’s a bouquet I bought just now from a beggar.”
Charles picked up the flowers, and freshening his eyes, red with tears, against them, smelt them delicately.
She took them quickly from his hand and put them in a glass of water.
The next day Madame Bovary senior arrived. She and her son wept much. Emma, on the pretext of giving orders, disappeared. The following day they had a talk over the mourning. They went and sat down with their workboxes by the waterside under the arbour.
Charles was thinking of his father, and was surprised to feel so much affection for this man, whom till then he had thought he cared little about. Madame Bovary senior was thinking of her husband. The worst days of the past seemed enviable to her. All was forgotten beneath the instinctive regret of such a long habit, and from time to time whilst she sewed, a big tear rolled along her nose and hung suspended there a