ughters, Lucile and
Angele. There was also Gregoire, at the mill, with a big boy who had
received the name of Robert; and there were also the three last married
daughters--Louise, with a girl two years old; Madeleine, with a boy six
months of age; and Marguerite, who in anticipation of a happy event, had
decided to call her child Stanislas, if it were a boy, and Christine, if
it should be a girl.

Thus upon every side the family oak spread out its branches, its trunk
forking and multiplying, and boughs sprouting from boughs at each
successive season. And withal Mathieu was not yet sixty, and Marianne
not yet fifty-seven. Both still possessed flourishing health, and
strength, and gayety, and were ever in delight at seeing the family,
which had sprung from them, thus growing and spreading, invading all the
country around, even like a forest born from a single tree.

But the great and glorious festival of Chantebled at that period was the
birth of Mathieu and Marianne's first great-grandchild--a girl, called
Angeline, daughter of their granddaughter, Berthe. In this little girl,
all pink and white, the ever-regretted Blaise seemed to live again.
So closely did she resemble him that Charlotte, his widow, already a
grandmother in her forty-second year, wept with emotion at the sight of
her. Madame Desvignes had died six months previously, passing away, even
as she had lived, gently and discreetly, at the termination of her task,
which had chiefly consisted in rearing her two daughters on the scanty
means at her disposal. Still it was she, who, before quitting the scene,
had found a husband for her granddaughter, Berthe, in the person of
Philippe Havard, a young engineer who had recently been appointed
assistant-manager at a State factory near Mareuil. It was at Chantebled,
however, that Berthe's little Angeline was born; and on the day of
the churching, the whole family assembled together there once more to
glorify the great-grandfather and great-grandmother.

"Ah! well," said Marianne gayly, as she stood beside the babe's cradle,
"if the young ones fly away there are others born, and so the nest will
never be empty."

"Never, never!" repeated Mathieu with emotion, proud as he felt of
that continual victory over solitude and death. "We shall never be left
alone!"

Yet there came another departure which brought them many tears. Nicolas,
the youngest but one of their boys, who was approaching his twentieth
birthday, and