Then in a louder voice:
"Are you following, André?"
And in their wake a cheery voice would reply:
"I am all right."
The strain was tremendous, but with it was mingled the joy of taking back his two sons.
Although there was no apparent reason, and he had not thought of her for weeks, the farmer's thoughts flew to his dead wife: "She would be pleased with me," he mused, "for taking Mathurin away from La Seulière." And at times in the turn of a canal he would seem to see a pair of blue eyes like those of his old wife smiling upon him, which gradually sank until they rested among the reeds under the punt. And he would dry his eyelids with his sleeve, shake himself free from the overmastering drowsiness, and say again to his youngest son:
"Are you following?"
The younger son was not dreaming. He was thinking over what he had seen and heard: Mathurin's senseless infatuation, his violence, which, when their father should be no more, would make life very difficult to the head at La Fromentière. The events of that evening had increased the temptation of pastures new to this disturbed mind. In course of time both punts had reached the duck meadow.