“There is the flume-chamber overhead,” said Angele.  “I will set the light here, and go down for a cup, madame.”

“Do not.  We will go to the flume-chamber together.  My hands, my throat, my eyes burn.  Go on, Angele, show me the way.”

Laurent’s room, therefore, was left in darkness, holding unseen its best furniture, the family’s holiday clothes of huge grained flannel, and the little yellow spinning-wheel, with its pile of unspun wool like forgotten snow.

In the fourth story, as below, deep-set swinging windows had small square panes, well dusted with flour.  Nothing broke the monotony of wall except a row of family snow-shoes.  The flume-chamber, inclosed from floor to ceiling, suggested a grain’s sprouting here and there in its upright humid boards.

As the two girls glanced around this grim space, they were startled by silence through the building, for the burrs ceased to work.  Feet and voices indeed stirred below, but the sashes no longer rattled.  Then a tramping seemed following them up, and Angele dragged the young lady behind a stone pillar, and blew out their candle.

“What are you doing?” demanded Madame De Mattissart in displeasure.  “If the door has been forced, should we desert our fathers?”

“It is not that,” whispered Angele.  And before she could give any reason for her impulse, the miller’s head and light appeared above the stairs.  It was natural enough for Angele La Vigne to avoid Laurent’s father.  What puzzled her was to see her own barefooted father creeping after the miller, his red wool night-cap pulled over dejected brows.

These good men had been unable to meet without quarreling since the match between Laurent and Angele was broken off, on account of a pig which Father La Vigne would not add to her dower.  Angele had a blanket, three dishes, six tin plates, and a kneading-trough; at the pig her father drew the line, and for a pig Laurent’s father contended.  But now all the La Vigne pigs were roasted or scattered, Angele’s dower was destroyed, and what had a ruined habitant to say to the miller of Petit Cap?

Father Robineau had stopped the mill because its noise might cover attacks.  As the milder ungeared his primitive machinery, he had thought of saving water in the flume-chamber.  There were wires and chains for shutting off its escape.

He now opened a door in the humid wall and put his candle over the clear, dark water.  The flume no longer furnished a supply, and he stared open-lipped, wondering if the enemy had meddled with his water-gate in the upland.

The flume, at that time the most ambitious wooden channel on the north shore, supported on high stilts of timber, dripped all the way from a hill stream to the fourth story of Petit Cap mill.  The miller had watched it escape burning thatches, yet something had happened at the dam.  Shreds of moss, half floating and half moored, reminded him to close the reservoir, and he had just moved the chains when La Vigne startled him by speaking at his ear.