Mathieu, who was very pale, slowly retired before this furious madman.  But as he went off he calmly said:  “You are an unhappy man.  I forgive you, for you are in great grief.  Besides, I am quite easy, sensible things always end by taking place.”

Again, a month went by.  Then, one rainy morning in October, Madame Lepailleur was found hanging in the mill stable.  There were folks at Janville who related that Lepailleur had hung her there.  The truth was that she had given signs of melancholia ever since the death of Antonin.  Moreover, the life led at the mill was no longer bearable; day by day the husband and wife reproached one another for their son’s death and their daughter’s flight, battling ragefully together like two abandoned beasts shut up in the same cage.  Folks were merely astonished that such a harsh, avaricious woman should have been willing to quit this life without taking her goods and chattels with her.

As soon as Therese heard of her mother’s death she hastened home, repentant, and took her place beside her father again, unwilling as she was that he should remain alone in his two-fold bereavement.  At first it proved a terrible time for her in the company of that brutal old man who was exasperated by what he termed his bad luck.  But she was a girl of sterling courage and prompt decision; and thus, after a few weeks, she had made her father consent to her marriage with Gregoire, which, as Mathieu had said, was the only sensible course.  The news gave great relief at the farm whither the prodigal son had not yet dared to return.  It was believed that the young couple, after eloping together, had lived in some out of the way district of Paris, and it was even suspected that Ambroise, who was liberally minded, had, in a brotherly way, helped them with his purse.  And if, on the one hand, Lepailleur consented to the marriage in a churlish, distrustful manner—­like one who deemed himself robbed, and was simply influenced by the egotistical dread of some day finding himself quite alone again in his gloomy house—­Mathieu and Marianne, on the other side, were delighted with an arrangement which put an end to an equivocal situation that had caused them the greatest suffering, grieved as they were by the rebellion of one of their children.

Curiously enough, it came to pass that Gregoire, once married and installed at the mill in accordance with his wife’s desire, agreed with his father-in-law far better than had been anticipated.  This resulted in particular from a certain discussion during which Lepailleur had wished to make Gregoire swear, that, after his death, he would never dispose of the moorland enclosure, hitherto kept uncultivated with peasant stubbornness, to any of his brothers or sisters of the farm.  Gregoire took no oath on the subject, but gayly declared that he was not such a fool as to despoil his wife of the best part of her inheritance, particularly as he proposed to cultivate those moors