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Oh! their boy would do great things, that was quite certain! Marianne, her heart oppressed by thought of the mourning which awaited her, had hitherto kept silent. She now asked, however, why little Therese did not form one of the party. Lepailleur dryly replied that he did not choose to embarrass himself with a child but six years old, who did not know how to behave.

Of course that cut down his wife's dowry; she inherited only a part of her father's property. And, besides, as the trade of a miller never enriched his father, Lepailleur curses his mill from morning till night, and declares that he won't prevent his boy Antonin from going to eat white bread in Paris, if he can find a good berth there when he grows up."

As the search for the runaways remained fruitless Lepailleur, boiling over with rancor, went up to the farm, and from the middle of the road for he did not venture inside poured forth a flood of ignoble insults.

"Please, Monsieur Lepailleur, it's a telegram." "All right, give it here." The lad, well pleased with the copper he received as a gratuity, had already gone off, and still the miller, instead of opening the telegram, stood examining the address on it with the distrustful air of a man who does not often receive such communications. However, he at last had to tear it open.

But Lepailleur raised a derisive laugh, and with the familiarity which the peasant displays towards the bourgeois whom he knows to be hard up, he said: "And so that makes you five, monsieur. Ah, well! that would be a deal too many for poor folks like us." "Why?" Mathieu quietly inquired.

On the following day, Monday, at two o'clock in the afternoon, Mathieu set out for the mill. But certain complications, a tragic drama, which he could not possibly foresee, awaited him there. For years now a stubborn struggle had been going on between Lepailleur and his wife with respect to Antonin.

And indeed, thinking that he might yet induce Mathieu to purchase all the remaining property, he determined to see Lepailleur and negotiate with him before even signing the deed which was to convey to Mathieu the selected marshland on the plateau. But the outcome proved as Mathieu had foreseen.

Moreover, a certain difficulty arose with regard to the purchase of the remaining moors, for enclosed by this land, eastward, near the railway line, were a few acres belonging to Lepailleur, the miller, who had never done anything with them.

"Haven't you got this mill, and don't you own fields, to give labor to the arms that would come and whose labor would double and treble your produce?" These simple words were like a whipstroke that made Lepailleur rear. And once again he poured forth all his spite.

And each time the battle began afresh, to such a point indeed that it seemed as if the shaky old mill would some day end by falling on their heads. Then, all at once, Antonin, a perfect wreck at thirty-six years of age, fell seriously ill. Lepailleur forthwith declared that if the scamp had the audacity to come home he would pitch him over the wheel into the water.