“Ah!” said Mathieu, as he sat near Marianne’s bed, holding her feverish hand, “to think of it!  To have struggled so much, and to have triumphed so much, and then to encounter this supreme grief, which will bring us more pain than all the others.  Decidedly it is true that one must continue battling until one’s last breath, and that happiness is only to be won by suffering and tears.  We must still hope, still triumph, and conquer and live.”

Marianne, however, had lost all courage, and seemed to be overwhelmed.

“No,” said she, “I have no energy left me, I am vanquished.  I was always able to heal the wounds which came from without, but this wound comes from my own blood; my blood pours forth within me and stifles me.  All our work is destroyed.  Our joy, our health, our strength, have at the last day become mere lies.”

Then Mathieu, whom her grievous fears of a disaster gained, went off to weep in the adjoining room, already picturing his wife dead and himself in utter solitude.

It was with reference to Lepailleur’s moorland, the plots intersecting the Chantebled estate, that the wretched quarrel had broken out between the mill and the farm.  For many years already, the romantic, ivy-covered old mill, with its ancient mossy wheel, had ceased to exist.  Gregoire, at last putting his father’s ideas into execution, had thrown it down to replace it by a large steam mill, with spacious meal-stores which a light railway-line connected with Janville station.  And he himself, since he had been making a big fortune—­for all the wheat of the district was now sent to him—­had greatly changed, with nothing of his youthful turbulence left save a quick temper, which his wife Therese with her brave, loving heart alone could somewhat calm.  On a score of occasions he had almost broken off all relations with his father-in-law, Lepailleur, who certainly abused his seventy years.  Though the old miller, in spite of all his prophecies of ruin, had been unable to prevent the building of the new establishment, he none the less sneered and jeered at it, exasperated as he was at having been in the wrong.  He had, in fact, been beaten for the second time.  Not only did the prodigious crops of Chantebled disprove his theory of the bankruptcy of the earth, that villainous earth in which, like an obstinate peasant weary of toil and eager for speedy fortune, he asserted nothing more would grow; but now that mill of his, which he had so disdained, was born as it were afresh, growing to a gigantic size, and becoming in his son-in-law’s hands an instrument of great wealth.