"It's a hateful work, Driot, we have done to-day." All the same, there was a difference between the sadness of father and son. Toussaint Lumineau, as he rooted up the vines, was already thinking of the day when he would plant fresh ones, and in his silent musings had seen his successor gathering in the vintage and drinking the muscadet of the new vineyard. He possessed that love, strong and tried, which rises hopefully after every stroke of misfortune. With André hope did not speak, because with him love had waxed feeble. The two men, their figures indistinct in the darkening day, turned to skirt the grassy edge of the vineyard, then descended the sloping fields that led towards the farm. With weary, stooping frame, shouldering their heavy implements, they looked across the Marais to the crimson horizon, and at the clouds driven by the wind towards the setting sun. It was a melancholy evening; all around them were furze-bushes, ground uncultivated, hedges devastated, leafless trees, the gloom and chill of autumn. Thus they had gone some two hundred yards before the son could make up his mind to speak, as though feeling that his reply would be too hard for the father, who lived on in the same old groove. "Yes," he said, "the day of the vine is at an end in our land, but it flourishes elsewhere." "Where, my Driot?" In the half dark the son extended his disengaged hand above La Fromentière, sunk below in the shadows; and the action extended so far, away over the Marais and over La Vendée, that through his stout woollen garments Toussaint Lumineau felt the keen blast of the wind. "What do other countries matter to us, my Driot," said he, "seeing that we are living in our own?" Did the son understand the anxious tenderness of the words? He answered: "Because in ours it becomes more and more difficult to live." Toussaint Lumineau remembered words, almost similar, spoken by François and was silent, trying to explain to himself how it was that André, who was neither lazy nor a frequenter of town pleasures, could have fallen upon the very same way of thought. As the men, skirting the brown fields, came nearer home, La Fromentière with its masses of trees rose like a dome of denser darkness, above which the winter night was lighting its first stars. The farmer never entered the beloved precincts of his home without emotion; to-night, more than ever, he experienced its sweetness, dear to him as any bridal promise. Rousille, hearing their approaching footsteps, opened the door, and raised the lamp high in air, like a signal. "You are late to-night," she said. Before they could make reply, the long-drawn sound of a horn was heard coming from the depths of the Marais, beyond Sallertaine. "It is the horn of La Seulière," cried the voice of Mathurin from within. The two men, followed by Rousille, entered the warm room with its blazing hearth. Mathurin resumed: "There's a dance at La Seulière to-night. Will you come, Driot?"