back to the truculence of savage life.  Men should manage and coerce each other either with the tongue, or with money, or with the law—­according to his theory of life.  But on such an occasion as this he found himself obliged to acknowledge that, if the worst should come to the worst, some attempt at choking his enemy must be made.  It must be made for Marie’s sake, if not for his own.  In this mood of mind he drove down to Granpere, and, not knowing where else to stop, drew up his horse in the middle of the road before the hotel.  The stable-servant, who was hanging about, immediately came to him;—­and there was his father standing, all alone, at the door of the house.  It was now ten o’clock, and he had expected that his father would have been away from home, as was his custom at that hour.  But the innkeeper’s mind was at present too full of trouble to allow of his going off either to the woodcutting or to the farm.

Adrian Urmand, after his failure with Marie on the preceding evening, had not again gone down-stairs.  He had taken himself at once to his bedroom, and had remained there gloomy and unhappy, very angry with Marie Bromar; but, if possible, more angry with Michel Voss.  Knowing, as he must have known, how the land lay, why had the innkeeper brought him from Basle to Granpere?  He found himself to have been taken in, from first to last, by the whole household, and he would at this moment have been glad to obliterate Granpere altogether from among the valleys of the Vosges.  And so he went to bed in his wrath.  Michel and Madame Voss sat below waiting for him above an hour.  Madame Voss more than once proposed that she should go up and see what was happening.  It was impossible, she declared, that they should be talking together all that time.  But her husband had stayed her.  ‘Whatever they have to say, let them say it out.’  It seemed to him that Marie must be giving way, if she submitted herself to so long an interview.  When at last Madame Voss did go up-stairs, she learned from the maid that M. Urmand had been in bed ever so long; and on going to Marie’s chamber, she found her sitting where she had sat before.  ’Yes, Aunt Josey, I will go to bed at once,’ she said.  ‘Give uncle my love.’  Then Aunt Josey had returned to her husband, and neither of them had been able to extract any comfort from the affairs of the evening.

Early on the following morning, M. le Cure was called to a consultation.  This was very distasteful to Michel Voss, because he was himself a Protestant, and, having lived all his life with a Protestant son and two Roman Catholic women in the house, he had come to feel that Father Gondin’s religion was a religion for the weaker sex.  He troubled himself very little with the doctrinal differences, having no slightest touch of an idea that he was to be saved because he was a Protestant, and that they were in peril because they were Roman Catholics.  Nor, indeed, was there any such idea on either side prevalent