I
conclude that business is looking up. So much the better, my dear
children, and may God send you every imaginable happiness! It
grieves me not yet to have seen my dear little grand-daughter,
Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for her in the
garden under your room, and I won't have it touched unless it is to
have jam made for her by-and-bye, that I will keep in the cupboard
for when she comes.

"Good-bye my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you too, my
son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with best
compliments, your loving father,

"THEODORE ROUAULT."

She held the coarse paper in her fingers for some minutes. The mistakes
in spelling interwove with one another, but Emma followed the kindly
thought that chattered through it all like a hen half hidden in a hedge
of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from the hearth, for a
little grey powder slipped from the letter on to her dress, and she
almost thought she saw her father bending over the hearth to take up the
tongs. How long since she had been with him, sitting on the footstool in
the chimney-corner, where she used to burn the end of a bit of wood in
the great flame of the sea-sedges! She remembered the summer evenings
all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when any one passed by, and
galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and sometimes
the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her window like
rebounding balls of gold. What happiness she had had at that time, what
freedom, what hope! What an abundance of illusions! Nothing was left of
them now. She had got rid of them all in her soul's life, in all her
successive conditions of life,--maidenhood, her marriage, and her
love;--thus constantly losing them all her life through, like a
traveller who leaves something of his wealth at every inn along his
road.

But what, then, made her so unhappy? What was the extraordinary
catastrophe that had transformed her? And she raised her head, looking
round as if to seek the cause of that which made her suffer.

An April ray was dancing on the china of the _etagere_; the fire burned;
beneath her slippers she felt the softness of the carpet; the day was
bright, the air warm, and she heard her child shouting with laughter.

In fact, the little girl was just then rolling on the lawn in the midst
of the grass that was being turned. She was lying flat on her stomach