But common sense and acquired experience regain the upper hand and put the visions to flight. We have been told so often that we were going a long way off, so often have we believed it, so often been undeceived! So, as if at a moment arranged, we wake up. "It's all my eye--they've done it on us too often. Wait before believing--and don't count a crumb's worth on it." We reoccupy our corner. Here and there a man bears in his hand the light momentous burden of a letter. "Ah," says Tirloir, "I must be writing. Can't go eight days without writing." "Me too," says Eudore, "I must write to my p'tit' femme." "Is she all right, Mariette?" "Oui, oui, don't fret about Mariette." A few have already settled themselves for correspondence. Barque is standing up. He stoops over a sheet of paper flattened on a note-book upon a jutting crag in the trench wall. Apparently in the grip of an inspiration, he writes on and on, with his eyes in bondage and the concentrated expression of a horseman at full gallop. When once Lamuse--who lacks imagination--has sat down, placed his little writing-block on the padded summit of his knees, and moistened his copying-ink pencil, he passes the time in reading again the last letters received, in wondering what he can say that he has not already said, and in fostering a grim determination to say something else. A sentimental gentleness seems to have overspread little Eudore, who is curled up in a sort of niche in the ground. He is lost in meditation, pencil in hand, eyes on paper. Dreaming, he looks and stares and sees. It is another sky that lends him light, another to which his vision reaches. He has gone home. In this time of letter-writing, the men reveal the most and the best that they ever were. Several others surrender to the past, and its first expression is to talk once more of fleshly comforts. Through their outer crust of coarseness and concealment, other hearts venture upon murmured memories, and the rekindling of bygone brightness: the summer morning, when the green freshness of the garden steals in upon the purity of the country bedroom; or when the wind in the wheat of the level lands sets it slowly stirring or deeply waving, and shakes the square of oats hard by into quick little feminine tremors; or the winter evening, with women and their gentleness around the shaded luster of the lamp. But Papa Blaire resumes work upon the ring he has begun. He has threaded the still formless disc of aluminium over a bit of rounded wood, and rubs it with the file. As he applies himself to the job, two wrinkles of mighty meditation deepen upon his forehead. Anon he stops, straightens himself, and looks tenderly at the trifle, as though she also were looking at it.