At four o’clock the newly married couple returned to the Rue de Choiseul. They brought Théophile and Valérie back in their carriage. As they went up to the second floor, where an apartment had been prepared for them, they came across Octave, who was also retiring to rest. The young man wished to draw politely on one side, but Berthe made a similar movement, and they knocked up against each other.
The word “mademoiselle” amused them immensely. She looked at him, and he recalled the first glance exchanged between them on that same staircase, a glance of gayety and daring, the charming welcome of which he again beheld. They understood each other perhaps; she blushed, whilst he went up alone to his room, in the midst of the death-like peacefulness of the upper floors.
Auguste, with his left eye closed up, half mad with the headache which had been clinging to him since the morning, was already in the apartment, where the other members of the family were arriving. Then, at the moment of quitting Berthe, Valérie yielded to a sudden fit of emotion, and pressing her in her arms, and completing the rumpling of her white dress, she kissed her, saying, in a low voice:
“Ah! my dear, I wish you better luck than I have had!”
Two days later, toward seven o’clock, as Octave arrived at the Campardons’ for dinner, he found Rose by herself, dressed in a cream-color dressing-gown, trimmed with white lace.
“No,” replied she, rather confused. “We will have dinner directly Achille comes in.”
The architect was abandoning his punctual habits; was never there at the proper time for his meals, arrived very red in the face, with a wild expression, and cursing business. Then he went off again every evening, on all kinds of pretexts, talking of appointments at cafés, inventing distant meetings. Octave, on these occasions, would often keep Rose company till eleven o’clock, for he had understood that the husband had him there to board to amuse his wife, and she would gently complain, and tell him her fears: ah! she left Achille very free, only she was so anxious when he came home after midnight!
“Do you not think he has been rather sad lately?” asked she, in a tenderly frightened tone of voice.
“I think he is rather worried, perhaps. The works at Saint-Roch cause him some anxiety.”