Charles escorted Mr. Stephen Roquevillard home, and Maurice’s father was left alone with his daughter. Outside the house the light was growing dim. Mist was cloaking the turret and the tower of the archives, as with an evening mantle. The office was filled with the special sadness that comes with the end of a winter’s day. Margaret put another log on the fire. “I’m glad it’s over,” said her father. “It passed off well, I thought.” But Margaret thought indignantly of her cousin Leo. “That Leo is bad,” she said. “I detest him.” “His mother is a fine woman,” was her father’s comment. They were silent. Then both of them glanced at the map of La Vigie on the wall. Instead of a faded sheet of paper, they saw a vision of the place again under the beautiful sunlight of the vintage time, with all its golden vines, the harvested fields, the pastures ready to be tilled, the great comfortable house. The estate which they had sentenced to be sold was making its last appeal to them. Like Maurice on the Calvary of Lemenc, before he had gone away from them, but with a different sort of love, a love from which all selfish thought of happiness was purged, they said good-bye to La Vigie. III MR. FRASNE’S CLEVER TRANSACTION NOTHING was being talked about in all Chambéry but the clever transaction of Mr. Frasne. It was especially the favourite topic of conversation at the reception given by Mr. and Mrs. Sassenay one evening in celebration of the eighteenth birthday of their daughter Jeanne. One of the characteristics of provincial society seems to be that the men take the occupations and preoccupations of the city into company with them, clinging to the excitements of their business in the midst of social pleasures. At the Sassenays’ they one and all abandoned the ladies to the rivalries of clothes, and between the waltzes made off hastily into corners to take up the burden of their financial slanders and professional cares. On this special occasion, the family drama which had shaken the Roquevillards’ long standing social status, with its climax due to come off the day after to-morrow--it was the evening of December 4th--at the sitting of the court of assizes, was stirring public comment to its depths. Public opinion in Chambéry was tired, no doubt, of the well-founded and continuous ascendancy of the Roquevillards. It was worked up with the desire for levelling down, which is one of the modern zeals, as well as irritation at the persistent pride that refused to plead for itself or beg for sympathy even in misfortune. People, in short, were on the watch for the final collapse of a race which at other times had been considered an ornament to the city.