"This will end in a visit from the gendarmes!"
At M. Bastian's farm the women and young girls were finishing their hop-picking. They were chattering, still laughing, or anxious, according to their age. The farmer had forbidden them to reopen the door looking on to the village street. He went on, always prudent in spite of his seeming joviality, to spread out the baskets of hop flowers, shining with fresh pollen. The oxen and the horses, passing near the yard, breathed in the air and stretched their necks.
And one at a time the women got up, shook their aprons, and weary, stretched their youthful arms, yawning at the freshness of the cool puffs of air which came over the roof, then started on their more or less distant way to home and supper.
At the Oberlés' house the dinner-bell rang. The meal was the shortest and the least gay that the wainscoting and delicately tinted paintings had ever witnessed.
Very few words were exchanged.
Lucienne was thinking of the new difficulty in the way of her projected marriage and of the violent irritation of M. von Kassewitz; Jean, of the hell that this house of the family had become; M. Oberlé, of his ambitions probably ruined; Madame Monica, of the possible departure of her son. Towards the end of dinner, at the moment when the servant was about to withdraw, M. Oberlé began to say, as if he were continuing a conversation:
"I am not accustomed, you know, my dear, to give in to violence: it exasperates me, that is all. I am then resolved to do two things—first to build another house in the timber-yard, where I shall be in my own home, then to hasten on Lucienne's marriage with Lieutenant von Farnow. Neither you nor my father nor any one can stop me. And I have just written to him about it."
M. Oberlé looked at each of them—his wife, son, and daughter—with the same expression of defiance. He added:
"These young people must be allowed to see each other and to talk to each other freely, betrothed as they are."
"Oh," said Madame Oberlé, "such things——"