Sunday afternoon had become Rousille's hour for solitude. She could only go to vespers when the farm-servant was left in charge of the house; and he had stipulated that he should go once a fortnight to Saint Jean-de-Mont to his sister, a deaf-mute. Mathurin, who formerly had not left La FromentiÈre, now never missed attending High Mass at Sallertaine, where he met FÉlicitÉ Gauvrit, greeted her for the most part without speaking, in order not to vex his father, watched her as she moved about the Place, then sat down at one of the inn tables to luette. As for AndrÉ, he seemed just now to like to be away from La FromentiÈre as much as possible, and on Sundays would be off as early as he could to the villages on the sea coast, where he sought out old sailors and travellers who could tell him of the countries where fortunes were to be made.

Rousille knew nothing of the attraction that led her brother so far afield. One day she affectionately reproached him with leaving her so much alone. At first he had laughed, then suddenly had grown serious and said:

"Don't reproach me with leaving you so much alone, Rousille. Perhaps you will reap the benefit of my tramps one of these days; I am acting in your interests."

Thus on the fourth Sunday in January La FromentiÈre was in charge of Rousille. But Rousille did not find time hang heavy on her hands; she had taken refuge in the threshing-floor at the back of the farm, and was sitting at the foot of a great heap of straw, her face turned towards the Marais, visible through a break in the hedge. She would have been frozen in the north wind that was blowing, had not the straw all about her kept in the warmth like a nest. Leaning her head back against it, she had buried her elbows in the soft depths of some loose straw that had been forked out from the compact mass and not yet taken away.

The air was so clear that she could see away to the clock tower of Perrier, to the most remote farmsteads of the Marais, and even to the ruddy streaks, but rarely visible, of the pine-grown downs that bordered the sea more than three leagues distant. She was looking before her, but her mind was travelling beyond her father's meadows, beyond the great Marais, beyond the horizon—for Jean Nesmy had written to her. Rousille had the letter in her pocket—was feeling it with the tips of her fingers. Since morning she had known it by heart, had said it over to herself many a time, that letter of Jean Nesmy; the smile it called forth did not leave her lips, save to light up her eyes. All care was driven away, forgotten. Little Rousille was still loved by someone; the letter testified to it. It said:

One by one, like the beads of a rosary being told, and that pass between the fingers of the devotee, the sentences of the letter passed through the mind of Marie-Rose, and her eyes gazing intently on the landscape, saw only the image of Jean Nesmy. The young girl saw him in his coat with the horn buttons, his high cheek-bones, his eager eyes that only laughed for her and for good work done, when at the close of day, his scythe slung on to his bare arm, he scanned the corn he had cut, and the sheaves he had tied standing upright in the stubble.

"Father no longer talks against him," thought she. "He even defended him once to Mathurin. As for me, he has never found me complain, nor refuse to do the work I had to do, and I think he is pleased with me for having done my best. If AndrÉ were to settle down now, and to bring a wife to La FromentiÈre, perhaps father would not refuse to let me marry. And I begin to think that Master AndrÉ has his reasons for absenting himself on Sundays, and going off to Saint Jean, Perrier, and Saint Gervais, as he does...."

She smiled. Her eyes had taken the colour of the fresh straw that surrounded her. Far away, on the road to the meadows, she saw a fine strapping youth walking with swaying movement, carrying over one shoulder a pole to jump the dykes with.

"Driot," she murmured. "I will tease him about his Sunday walks."

Soon she saw AndrÉ come up the hill, skirt the dwarf orchard, then pass between the leafless hedges in the road. When he was at a little distance, she coughed to attract his attention. He looked up. His face which had worn an anxious expression cleared; instead of continuing his way to the courtyard of La FromentiÈre, he jumped over into a small field that ran beside it, passed the row of hives where the bees were sleeping their winter sleep, and stopped beside Rousille in the threshing-floor, leaning on his pole. As he did so, he endeavoured to assume the half-bantering, half-protecting air he usually adopted towards his sister, thinking himself obliged to laugh with her as with a child.

"I was looking for you," he said.

"Oh, you were looking for me very badly then. Your head was bent down. I believe you were thinking of someone else than me."

"Indeed!"

"Yes. Where do you come from with your pole, you roamer? Not from vespers?"

"No, from Saint Jean. The water is grand, and jolly cold. On the other side of Le Perrier there are inundations on both sides of the road."

"You have been calling at the farms, I suppose. Did you stop at La SeuliÈre?"

"You do not know me one bit; do you think I should go against...."

He was about to say "against the intrigues of Mathurin, who has returned to his former infatuation," but he stopped short. So happy herself that she did not notice his reticence, she resumed:

"To the Levrelles? No? Then to the mill of Moque-Souris, where there is that pretty little Marie Dieu-donnÉe, the prettiest miller's daughter between here and Beauvoir?"

"Still wrong."

Trying to be grave, but without succeeding in hiding the joy that pervaded her whole soul, she resumed:

"You see, I want you so much to marry, AndrÉ. And such a dear boy as you are, I think it would be easy. Indeed, you have no idea how greatly I wish it!"

AndrÉ's face grew careworn again as before, and he said:

"On the contrary I know very well...."

"No. You always think of me as a child. But I am twenty, Driot. I know when others are unhappy. You, for instance, are grieving over our FranÇois; you miss him even more than father does. If you were to marry, you would forget your sorrow a little. Settled down at La FromentiÈre, married to a girl you love, your thoughts would no longer be brooding over the past as now."

"And above all," put in AndrÉ, "there would be a housekeeper here, and little Rousille could marry her faithful swain."

Pressing herself back against the rick with a girlish movement of shoulders, head, and arms, Rousille raised herself and knelt forward the better to reach her pocket. Bending over the aperture hidden amongst the innumerable folds of her dress, she extracted the letter and gently held up the square of paper to her brother, raising it to the level of her head and following it with her eyes as she did so.

"I would show it to no one but you, AndrÉ ... read my letter ... I want to prove that I have confidence in you. And then you will understand how light it makes one's heart to receive such a dear letter, so light that one feels like air. It will make you want to receive such an one yourself."

AndrÉ took the letter without showing the slightest impatience, and without a word of thanks. But as he read, he grew moved, not with jealousy of such love, but with pity for the girl, who was dreaming her dream of happiness between two misfortunes.

For he had definitely decided to leave the farmstead and La VendÉe. Some tidings, in a measure foreseen, dreaded for some time past, very serious for La FromentiÈre, had caused him to come to a decision that very afternoon. He had returned home, sorrow stricken, weighing all the pain he was about to cause; and now coming upon this joy, this hope of Rousille's, those eyes that persisted in smiling at life, that flower of the ruined farmstead, the feeling came over him that he must spare the child, at least, that one evening, and not tell her at once all he knew.

Having read the letter he slowly folded it, and gave it back to Rousille, who, impatient for an appreciative comment, her whole soul in her eyes, her lips breaking into a smile, asked:

"Do you think that father would consent, if you were to marry, and if you spoke for my Jean?"

"Would you go to live in the Bocage, Rousille?"

"I should have to on account of Mathurin, who would never suffer us near him."

She was surprised at the manner in which AndrÉ looked at her, so gravely and so tenderly. Taking her hand in both of his, her hand which still held the letter, he said:

"No, little Rousille, I will not speak for you. But I will shortly do something else, of which I cannot tell you now, and which will avail you. The day I do it, your marriage will be assured, unless father breaks up everything.... And it will not be at the Bocage that you will make your home, but at La FromentiÈre, in our mother's place—the dear mother with whom we were so happy in the days of our childhood. Put your faith in what I say, and do not worry about Mathurin."

Letting go her hand, which fell to her side, he added:

"I have an idea that you, at least, will be happy, Rousille."

She opened her lips to speak; he made her a sign that he would say no more. All the same Rousille asked hurriedly, seeing him move away: "One thing only, AndrÉ, tell me only one thing. Promise me that you will always till the ground, for father would be so grieved...."

And he answered:

"I promise you, I will."

Rousille watched him as he went round the corner, and on into the courtyard. What was the matter with him? What meant those mysterious words? Why had he spoken the last so sadly? For a moment she wondered; but the trouble was evanescent. Scarce had solitude returned about her, than Rousille heard again the words of her love-letter singing their soft refrain to her. They came into her heart, one by one, like transparent waves, each opening out in its turn and covering the shore. "It cannot be a very important secret," thought she, "since Driot will continue to till the ground, that will make father happy, and I shall be happy too."

She recalled the smile that had passed over her brother's face, and thought: "It is nothing," and peace, entire, unquestioning, returned to her.

In the twilight of that winter afternoon on the borders of the Marais of Sallertaine, for one short hour there was a girl who smiled at life, and deemed that bad times were past and gone. She was still smiling, still sheltered in her retreat amid the straw, when AndrÉ accosted his father, coming in from the Sunday tour of inspection, with:

"Everything is certainly going to the bad, father." The farmer, his head full of the promise of hay and wheat harvests he had just been examining, answered contentedly:

"No, everything is coming up well. The spring crop of oats is promising; what is going to the bad?"

"I heard at Saint Jean-de-Mont that there is to be a sale of the furniture at the ChÂteau, father!"

For a moment Toussaint Lumineau could not take it in.

"Yes, all the furniture," repeated AndrÉ. "It is advertised in the papers. See, if you don't believe me, here's the list. Everything is to be sold."

He drew a paper from his pocket, and pointed with his finger to an advertisement, from which the old farmer laboriously read:

"On Sunday, February 20th, MaÎtre Oulry, notary at Chalons, will proceed to sell the furniture of the ChÂteau de la FromentiÈre. There will be sold: the entire drawing-room and dining-room furniture, old tapestries, oak chests, pictures, beds, tables, china and glass, wines, guns, contents of the library, wardrobes, etc."

"Well?" exclaimed AndrÉ.

"Oh," returned his father, "who would have foretold this eight years ago? Have they become poor, then, in Paris?" He fell into silence, not willing to judge his master too hardly.

"It is ruin," said AndrÉ. "After the furniture, they will be for selling the land, and us with it!" The head of La FromentiÈre, the successor of so many farmers under the same masters, was standing in the middle of the room; he raised his weary eyes until they rested upon the little copper crucifix hanging at the head of his bed, then let them fall again in sign of acceptance.

"It will be a great misfortune," he said, "but it will not hinder our working!"

And he went out, perhaps to shed tears.