He stopped, hesitating, pricking up his ears. Trumpet-blasts sounded in the distance, ringing from valley to valley, echoing and re-echoing against the obstacles formed by the great granite rocks and dying away to right and left, as though stifled by the shadow of the forests. He whispered, excitedly: "The French bugle...." "Are you sure?" "Yes, there are troops of Alpines manoeuvring ... a company from Noirmont.... Listen ... listen.... What gaiety!... What swagger!... I tell you, close to the frontier like this, it takes such an air...." She listened too, seized with the same excitement, and asked, anxiously: "Do you really think that war is possible?" "Yes," he replied, "I do." They were silent for a moment. And Morestal continued: "It's a presentiment with me.... We shall have it all over again, as in 1870.... And, mark you, I hope that this time ..." She put down her breakfast-cup, which she had found in a cupboard, and, leaning on her husband's arm: "I say, the boy's coming ... with his wife. She's a dear girl and we're very fond of her.... I want the house to look nice for them, bright and full of flowers.... Go and pick the best you have in your garden." He smiled: "That's another way of saying that I'm boring you, eh? I can't help it. I shall be just the same to my dying day. The wound is too deep ever to heal." They looked at each other for a while with a great gentleness, like two old travelling-companions, who, from time to time, for no particular reason, stop, exchange glances or thoughts and then resume their journey. He asked: "Must I cut my roses? My Gloires de Dijon?" "Yes." "Come along then! I'll be a hero!" * * * Morestal, the son and grandson of well-to-do farmers, had increased his fathers' fortune tenfold by setting up a mechanical saw-yard at Saint-Elophe, the big neighbouring village. He was a plain, blunt man, as he himself used to say, "with no false bottom, nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeves;" just a few moral ideas to guide his course through life, ideas as old and simple as could be. And those few ideas themselves were subject to a principle that governed his whole existence and ruled all his actions, the love of his country, which, in Morestal, stood for regret for the past, hatred of the present and, especially, the bitter recollection of defeat. Elected Mayor of Saint-Elophe and a district-councillor, he sold his works and built, within view of the frontier, on the site of a ruined mill, a large house designed after his own plans and constructed, so to speak, under his own eyes. The Morestals had lived here for the last ten years, with their two servants: Victor, a decent, stout, jolly-faced man, and Catherine, a Breton woman who had nursed Philippe as a baby.