The voices had given no reply. The third time Toussaint Lumineau thought he distinguished a feeble cry, very distant, coming through the icy fog, and leaving the canal which runs straight to Perrier, he turned off to the left. From time to time he called again, but hearing no further sound, and fearing to have taken a wrong direction, he unfastened the lantern, and drew up to the side to see if there were traces of a punt pole. Some hundred yards further on he detected by newly-made marks in the mud that the bank had been grazed; a punt had certainly passed that way. Was it Mathurin's? He followed it. The punt had made the circuit of a meadow, but on which side had it gone out? In vain the farmer, forcing his way through the rushes, tried the different canals that cut it at right angles, each time he came back baffled; all traces had disappeared. He was about to turn back when, by the light of his lantern, he caught sight of a piece of floating wood. He stooped to catch it; a presentiment of the truth flashed across him; it was one of the Fromentière punt poles, drifting, carried by the wind towards the spot where the banks under water had converted meadow and dyke into one great lake. The farmer thought his son's boat had upset. "Hold on, Mathurin!" he cried. "I am coming. Hold on!" and with a stroke of the pole he pushed on into the channel. "Where are you, Mathurin?" In the chopping waves of the open water he had made some thirty yards, when he was suddenly thrown forward. Stooping over the side, he felt about, and caught hold of another boat, which he drew alongside his own. Then turning the lantern upon it, he saw at the bottom of the punt his son, lying motionless. Toussaint Lumineau threw himself on his knees, nearly sending the boat under water; he felt his son's temples, there was no pulsation; his hands, they were icy cold; he put his mouth to the dead man's ear, and twice called him by name. "Answer me, my son," he implored. "Answer! Move but a finger to show me you are still living." But his son's fingers did not move; the lips clothed by the tawny beard remained motionless, open as when the last cry proceeded from them.