large dilapidated room with a stove, now used as a wood-house, cellar,
and pantry, full of old rubbish, of empty casks, agricultural implements
past service, and a mass of dusty things whose use it was impossible to
guess.

The garden, longer than wide, ran between two mud walls with espaliered
apricots, to a hawthorn hedge that separated it from the field. In the
middle was a slate sundial on a brick pedestal; four flower-beds with
eglantines surrounded symmetrically the more useful kitchen-garden bed.
At the bottom, under the spruce bushes, was a cure in plaster reading
his breviary.

Emma went upstairs. The first room was not furnished, but in the second,
which was their bedroom, was a mahogany bedstead in an alcove with red
drapery. A shell-box adorned the chest of drawers, and on the secretary
near the window a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin
ribbons stood in a bottle. It was a bride's bouquet; it was the other
one's. She looked at it. Charles noticed it; he took it and carried it
up to the attic, while Emma, seated in an armchair (they were putting
her things down around her) thought of her bridal flowers packed up in a
bandbox, and wondered, dreaming, what would be done with them if she
were to die.

During the first days she occupied herself in thinking about changes in
the house. She took the shades off the candlesticks, had new wall-paper
put up, the staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round the
sundial; she even inquired how she could get a basin with a jet fountain
and fishes. Finally, her husband, knowing that she liked to drive out,
picked up a second-hand dog-cart, which, with new lamps and a
splash-board in striped leather, looked almost like a tilbury.

He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal together, a
walk in the evening on the highroad, a gesture of her hands over her
hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener, and
many another thing in which Charles had never dreamed of pleasure, now
made up the endless round of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, by
her side, on the pillow, he watched the sunlight sinking into the down
on her fair cheek, half hidden by the lappets of her nightcap. Seen thus
closely, her eyes looked to him enlarged, especially when, on waking up,
she opened and shut them rapidly many times. Black in the shade, dark
blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, depths of different
colors, that, darker in