But of these noisy patriots Bernadou was never one.  He had the instinctive conservatism of the French peasant, which is in such direct and tough antagonism with the feverish socialism of the French artisan.  His love was for the soil—­a love deep-rooted as the oaks that grew in it.  Of Paris he had a dim, vague dread, as of a superb beast continually draining and devouring.  Of all forms of government he was alike ignorant.  So long as he tilled his little angle of land in peace, so long as the sun ripened his fruits and corn, so long as famine was away from his door and his neighbours dwelt in good-fellowship with him, so long he was happy, and cared not whether he was thus happy under a monarchy, an empire, or a republic.  This wisdom, which the peddler called apathy and cursed, the young man had imbibed from nature and the teachings of Reine Allix.  “Look at home and mind thy word,” she had said always to him.  “It is labour enough for a man to keep his own life clean and his own hands honest.  Be not thou at any time as they are who are for ever telling the good God how He might have made the world on a better plan, while the rats gnaw at their hay-stacks and the children cry over an empty platter.”

And he had taken heed to her words, so that in all the country-side there was not any lad truer, gentler, braver, or more patient at labour than was Bernadou; and though some thought him mild even to foolishness, and meek even to stupidity, he was no fool; and he had a certain rough skill at music, and a rare gift at the culture of plants, and made his little home bright within the winter-time with melody, and in the summer gay without as a king’s parterre.

At any rate, Reine Allix and he had been happy together for a quarter of a century under the old gray thatch of the wayside cottage, where it stood at the foot of the village street, with its great sycamores spread above it.  Nor were they less happy when in mid-April, in the six and twentieth year of his age, Bernadou had come in with a bunch of primroses in his hand, and had bent down to her and saluted her with a respectful tenderness, and said softly and a little shyly, “Gran’mere, would it suit you if I were ever—­to marry?”

Reine Allix was silent a minute and more, cherishing the primroses and placing them in a little brown cupful of water.  Then she looked at him steadily with her clear, dark eyes.  “Who is it, my child?” He was always a child to her, this last-born of the numerous brood that had once dwelt with her under the spreading branches of the sycamores, and had now all perished off the face of the earth, leaving himself and her alone.

Bernadou’s eyes met hers frankly.  “It is Margot Dal.  Does that please you, gran’mere, or no?”

“It pleases me well,” she said, simply.  But there was a little quiver about her firm-set mouth, and her aged head was bent over the primroses.  She had foreseen it; she was glad of it; and yet for the instant it was a pang to her.