"Little mother!" Angelot said, and stepped up into the porch among the chickens.
His eyes, quick to read her face, saw a shadow on it, and he wondered who had done wrong, himself or his father.
"Enfin, te voilà!" said Madame de la Marinière. "Have you brought us any game? Ah, I am glad—" as he showed her his well-filled bag. "Your father came home two hours ago; he expected to find you here; he wanted you to do some service or other for these cousins."
"I am sorry," said Angelot. "I could not leave Uncle Joseph. I have a hundred things to tell you. Some rather serious, and some will make you die of laughing, as they did me."
"Mon Dieu! I should be glad to laugh," said his mother.
Angelot had taken the basket from her hand, and was throwing the chickens their last grain. She stood on the highest step, with a little sigh which might have been of fatigue or of disgust, and her eyes, as she gazed across the valley, were half angry, half melancholy. The sun had gone down behind the opposite hills, and the broad front of the Château de Lancilly, in full view of La Marinière, looked grey and cold against the woods, even in the warm twilight of that rosy evening.
"Strange, that it should be inhabited again!" Angelot had emptied the basket, and stood beside his mother; the chickens bustled and scrambled about the foot of the steps.
"Yes, and as I hear, by all the perfections," said Madame de la Marinière. "Hervé de Sainfoy is more friendly than ever—and well he may be—his wife is supremely pretty and agreeable, his younger girls are most amiable, and as for Hélène, nothing so enchantingly beautiful has ever set foot in Anjou. Take care, my poor Ange, I beseech you."
Angelot laughed. "Then I suppose my father's next duty will be to find a husband for her. I hear she is difficult—or her parents for her, perhaps."
"Who told you so?"