When they all came back to the house they paused for a moment before it, to the left of the steps, under the windows of the very room where Monsieur Jérôme had died. From that point one perceived--between the crests of the great trees--the distant roofs of Beauclair, and then La Crêcherie and the Abyss. They gazed upon that spreading panorama in silence. They could plainly distinguish the Abyss, now built afresh on the same plan as La Crêcherie, and forming with it one sole city of work--work, reorganised and ennobled, transformed into man's pride, health, and gaiety. More justice and more love were born there every morning. And the waves of little smiling houses, set in greenery, those waves which the anxious Delaveau had seen always advancing, had flowed over the once black land without a halt, ever enlarging the future city. They now occupied the whole expanse from the ridge of the Bleuse Mountains to the Mionne, and they would soon cross the narrow torrent, to sweep away Old Beauclair, that sordid agglomeration of the hovels of servitude and agony. And as they advanced they built up stone by stone--under the fraternal sun, even to the verge of the fertile fields of La Roumagne--the city where all at last would be freedom, justice, and happiness. II Whilst evolution was carrying Beauclair towards its new destiny, love, young, gay, and victorious, asserted itself, and on all sides there came frequent marriages, drawing various classes together and hastening the advent of harmony and final peace. Love the victorious overthrew all obstacles, triumphed over the greatest resistance with a passion full of happy vitality, an explosion of joy which proclaimed in the broad sunlight what happiness there was in being, in loving, in creating yet more and more.