resignation as they exchanged glances.

Then the head of the family rose, saying: "Well! God's will be done!
affection isn't made to order!"

"Come to supper, Germain," said the mother-in-law. "It's a pity that
couldn't be arranged better; however, it wasn't God's will, it seems. We
must look somewhere else."

"Yes," the old man added, "as my wife says, we must look somewhere
else."

There was no further sound in the house, and when Petit-Pierre rose the
next morning with the larks, at dawn, being no longer excited by the
extraordinary events of the last two days, he relapsed into the normal
apathy of little peasants of his age, forgot all that had filled his
little head, and thought of nothing but playing with his brothers, and
_being a man_ with the horses and oxen.

Germain tried to forget, too, by plunging into his work again; but he
became so melancholy and so absent-minded that everybody noticed it. He
did not speak to little Marie, he did not even look at her; and yet, if
any one had asked him in which pasture she was, or in what direction she
had gone, there was not an hour in the day when he could not have told
if he had chosen to reply. He had not dared ask his people to take her
on at the farm during the winter, and yet he was well aware that she
must be suffering from poverty. But she was not suffering, and Mère
Guillette could never understand why her little store of wood never grew
less, and how her shed was always filled in the morning when she had
left it almost empty the night before. It was the same with the wheat