bent forward with a look
of indecision, she would laugh, afraid of falling into the puddles of
water.

When they arrived in front of her garden, Madame Bovary opened the
little gate, ran up the steps and disappeared.

Leon returned to his office. His chief was away; he just glanced at the
briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last took up his hat and went
out.

He went to La Pature at the top of the Argueil hills at the beginning of
the forest; he threw himself upon the ground under the pines and gazed
at the sky through his fingers.

"How bored I am!" he said to himself, "how bored I am!"

He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais
for a friend and Monsieur Guillaumin for master. The latter, entirely
absorbed by his business, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and red
whiskers over a white cravat, understood nothing of mental refinements,
although he affected a stiff English manner, which in the beginning had
impressed the clerk.

As to the chemist's spouse, she was the best wife in Normandy, gentle as
a sheep, loving her children, her father, her mother, her cousins,
weeping for others' woes, letting everything go in her household, and
detesting corsets; but so slow of movement, such a bore to listen to, so
common in appearance, and of such restricted conversation, that although
she was thirty, he only twenty, although they slept in rooms next each
other and he spoke to her daily, he never thought that she might be a
woman for another, or that she possessed anything else of her sex than
the gown.

And what else was there? Binet, a few shopkeepers, two or three
publicans, the cure, and, finally, Monsieur Tuvache, the mayor, with his
two sons, rich, crabbed, obtuse persons, who farmed their own lands and
had feasts among themselves, bigoted to boot, and quite unbearable
companions.

But from the general background of all these human faces Emma's stood
out isolated and yet farthest off; for between her and him he seemed to
see a vague abyss.

In the beginning he had called on her several times along with the
druggist. Charles had not appeared particularly anxious to see him
again, and Leon did not know what to do between his fear of being
indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that seemed almost
impossible.

IV.

SILENT HOMAGE.

When the first cold days set in Emma left her bedroom for the
sitting-room, a long apartment with a low ceiling, in which there was on
the m