Soon she was left alone on the path that stretches to the sea. Then slackening her pace, she gave herself up without restraint to her thoughts. She was not happy at home. At sixty-five her father had married again a woman of thirty of loose character, whom he had met at Barre-de-Mont, and to whom in virtue of her youth he had made over the most realisable part of his property. The young stepmother was not kind to Félicité. One reproached the other with extravagance and ruining the home. The eldest brother, in the Customs at Sables d'Olonne, a gambler and hard drinker, was perpetually threatening the old man with a summons for falsified accounts, and by thus intimidating him drained still further the diminished capital of the Gauvrits. The old family, once so respected in the Marais, was rapidly declining, and this Félicité knew too well. The young men of Sallertaine and the neighbouring parishes came readily enough to dances at La Seulière; they danced, drank, joked with her, but not one of them offered to marry her. The impending ruin, the family divisions, kept suitors away. Yet another reason, more real, and one that appealed more strongly to sentiment than any other, held back the sons of farmers, and even farm-labourers from asking the hand of Félicité Gauvrit in marriage; and this was the tie, binding only in honour, the debt of fidelity, rendered even more sacred by misfortune, which public opinion obstinately maintained as still existing between La Seulière and La Fromentière. In everybody's opinion Félicité Gauvrit remained one of the Lumineau household; a girl who had not the right to withdraw her betrothal promise, and who was not to be sought in marriage by any other while Mathurin was living. Some men even had a superstitious dread of her; they would have been afraid to set up housekeeping with a girl whose first love had met so unhappy a fate. All the advances she had made had come to nought. Soured and embittered, in her rage she had gone so far as to regret that the cripple had not been killed on the spot. Had the poor wretch, who was scarcely to be called living, died then and there, she would have recovered her liberty, the past would have been quickly forgotten; while now, it was kept in everyone's memory by the sight of the maimed man on crutches, hanging about the farmstead of which he should have been master. She had found that Death is sometimes long in claiming its victims. Then courage had returned; in her astuteness Félicité had recognised that public opinion holding her as belonging to the Lumineau family, by them only could she realise her ambition: to go away from La Seulière, escape the domination of her stepmother, and become the mistress of a large farm, with more means and freedom than ever she had possessed at home. Never having loved her former betrothed, actuated only by vanity, as is sometimes the case in country surroundings, she had said to herself: