"I will bide my time. I will make them long the more for me by not going to La Fromentière. One day Mathurin will come to me, or will call me to him. I am positive that he has not forgotten me. Stupid of him; but it will help my ends. Thanks to him, I shall see them all again; the old man who mistrusts me, the young men who will admire me for my beauty. And I shall marry either François or André, and shall be the mistress of a farm as I ought to be, and of the richest farm in the whole parish." Now François, whom she had tried to captivate, had gone away. But, on the other hand, Mathurin had come to her; at the cost of terrible fatigue and suffering he had dragged himself to Sallertaine to greet her publicly; while André, before all the girls, had said: "It is an age since I saw you. You are not a bit altered." Félicité had gathered one of the yellow irises that grew so profusely on the Marais. Half laughing she thought over her recent triumph, the iris lightly held between her lips; her arms swinging as she walked caused the full sleeves to rustle against the moiré of her apron; her smiling gaze was directed to the distant meadows. She was thinking that André would make a handsome husband, better looking than ever Mathurin had been; that, after all, he was one year younger than herself, that he had engaging manners, and had not been wanting in audacity either to have said: "You have not altered." And she went on to think: "The first opportunity that offers, I will invite them to a dance at home. I am sure that André will come." Slowly she walked along the raised path in the burning rays of the mid-day sun. Grasshoppers were chirping; every now and again the acrid scent of fading rushes was in the air. Wholly absorbed in her daydream, Félicité Gauvrit did not perceive that she had nearly reached home. The white buildings of La Seulière, standing out in the meadow, came as an unwelcome surprise. At the same moment a doubt crossed her mind, disturbing, unbidden ending to her dream. Suppose André too were to go away? Or that Mathurin, elated as he was sure to be by the least sign of remembrance, and made thereby more eager, more jealous, were to guess what was in the wind? Félicité had stopped in the middle of the bridge that led from the path to the farm. The tall, supple young woman raised her arms above her head, scowled impatiently, and snapped the stem of the yellow iris, which fell prone into the dyke, then following it with her eyes for a second, she looked at her own reflection in the water, and smiled again. "I shall succeed," she said. And descending the slope of the bridge she reached La Seulière by the cross road. CHAPTER IX. THE CONSCRIPTS OF SALLERTAINE.