"I like you in this, but I bet anything that you will not be sorry to lay aside your soldier's toggery."
"All right, father," returned André, laughing at the unwitting affront to his uniform, and his father's indirect mode of inviting him to change to civilian dress. "I am not got up in Sallertaine guise; I'll go and change."
From the bottom of the chest in the end room, beside the bed where he was to sleep, André took the carefully folded work-day suit, laid there by him the day he left. He took great pains with the waxing of his moustache, and adjusting the brim of his hat, adorned his button-hole with a sprig of jasmine; then going the length of the house, opened the kitchen door, and there, framed against the old walls, his slim figure clad in cloth suit, was seen the handsomest young Vendéen of the Marais. Bronzed and fair-haired, his joyous face reflected the happiness of the others.
"Ah, Driot," exclaimed the farmer merrily, "now you are quite yourself again! You were my son before, but not so completely my very own as now," then added: "Now come, and we will drink to your health, and that you may stay at La Fromentière; for I am ageing fast, and you shall take my place."
Mathurin, sitting at table beside his father, became very gloomy. When the glasses were filled, he raised his with the others, but did not clink it against that of André.
CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE PLACE DE L'EGLISE.
The bells rang out the close of High Mass; choir boys chanted the Deo gratias.
As in its early days, when in the last years of the twelfth century it was erected on the summit of the Isle of Sallertaine, the little church, now yellow with age and growth of lichen and wild-flower, witnessed the crowd of worshippers, dressed in the same fashions as then, pour out from the same doors in the same order and collect in the same groups in the same Place.