wn gate he caught the post and was shot out of the cart
head first. The horse went on slowly to the door. At Susan's piercing
cries the farm hands rushed out. She thought him dead, but he was only
sleeping where he fell, and cursed his men, who hastened to him, for
disturbing his slumbers.

Autumn came. The clouded sky descended low upon the black contours
of the hills; and the dead leaves danced in spiral whirls under naked
trees, till the wind, sighing profoundly, laid them to rest in the
hollows of bare valleys. And from morning till night one could see all
over the land black denuded boughs, the boughs gnarled and twisted, as
if contorted with pain, swaying sadly between the wet clouds and
the soaked earth. The clear and gentle streams of summer days rushed
discoloured and raging at the stones that barred the way to the sea,
with the fury of madness bent upon suicide. From horizon to horizon the
great road to the sands lay between the hills in a dull glitter of empty
curves, resembling an unnavigable river of mud.

Jean-Pierre went from field to field, moving blurred and tall in the
drizzle, or striding on the crests of rises, lonely and high upon the
gray curtain of drifting clouds, as if he had been pacing along the very
edge of the universe. He looked at the black earth, at the earth
mute and promising, at the mysterious earth doing its work of life in
death-like stillness under the veiled sorrow of the sky. And it seemed
to him that to a man worse than childless there was no promise in
the fertility of fields, that from him the earth escaped, defied him,
frowned at him like the clouds, sombre and hurried above his head.
Having to face alone his own fields, he felt the inferiority of man who
passes away before the clod that remains. Must he give up the hope of
having by his side a son who would look at the turned-up sods with a
master's eye? A man that would think as he thought, that would feel as
he felt; a man who would be part of himself, and yet remain to trample
masterfully on that earth when he was gone? He thought of some distant
relations, and felt savage enough to curse them aloud. They! Never! He
turned homewards, going straight at the roof of his dwelling, visible
between the enlaced skeletons of trees. As he swung his legs over the
stile a cawing flock of birds settled slowly on the field; dropped down
behind his back, noiseless and fluttering, like flakes of soot.

That day Madame Levaille had gone