‘And this,’ thought George, ’is in truth the state of my father’s mind!  There are three of us concerned who are all equally dear to each other, my father, myself, and Marie Bromar.  There is not one of them who doesn’t feel that the presence of the others is necessary to his happiness.  Here is my father declaring that the world will no longer have any savour for him because I am away in one place, and Marie is to be away in another.  There is not the slightest real reason on earth why we should have been separated.  Yet he,—­he alone has done it; and we,—­we are to break our hearts over it!  Or rather he has not done it.  He is about to do it.  The sacrifice is not yet made, and yet it must be made, because my father is so unreasonable that no one will dare to point out to him where lies the way to his own happiness and to the happiness of those he loves!’ It was thus that George Voss thought of it as he listened to his father’s wailings.

But he himself, though he was hot in temper, was slow, or at least deliberate, in action.  He did not even now speak out at once.  When his father’s pipe was finished he suggested that they should go on to a certain run for the fir-logs, which he himself—­George Voss—­ had made—­a steep grooved inclined plane by which the timber when cut in these parts could be sent down with a rush to the close neighbourhood of the saw-mill below.  They went and inspected the slide, and discussed the question of putting new wood into the groove.  Michel, with the melancholy tone that had prevailed with him all the morning, spoke of matters as though any money spent in mending would be thrown away.  There are moments in the lives of most of us in which it seems to us that there will never be more cakes and ale.  George, however, talked of the children, and reminded his father that in matters of business nothing is so ruinous as ruin.  ’If you’ve got to get your money out of a thing, it should always be in working order,’ he said.  Michel acknowledged the truth of the rule, but again declared that there was no money to be got out of the thing.  He yielded, however, and promised that the repairs should be made.  Then they went down to the mill, which was going at that time.  George, as he stood by and watched the man and boy adjusting the logs to the cradle, and listened to the apparently self-acting saw as it did its work, and observed the perfection of the simple machinery which he himself had adjusted, and smelt the sweet scent of the newly-made sawdust, and listened to the music of the little stream, when, between whiles, the rattle of the mill would cease for half a minute,—­George, as he stood in silence, looking at all this, listening to the sounds, smelling the perfume, thinking how much sweeter it all was than the little room in which Madame Faragon sat at Colmar, and in which it was, at any rate for the present, his duty to submit his accounts to her, from time to time,—­resolved that he would at once make an effort.  He knew his father’s temper well.  Might it not be that though there should be a quarrel for a time, everything would come right at last?  As for Adrian Urmand, George did not believe,—­or told himself that he did not believe,—­that such a cur as he would suffer much because his hopes of a bride were not fulfilled.