locks opened again, the tow-boat again fished up its endless hawser, and from one boat to the other the sailors bent over their oars.
The boat began moving, taking up the line again. Slowly, straight on toward Rupel the file descended.
Laurent also wandered by stage-coach through the far-away and, nevertheless, near-by districts. Between Beveren and Calloo in the Waes district he saw the rhythmic fall of the flail threshing wheat. A girl, her dress unfastened at the bosom, shining as the apple of the district, ran up and climbed on the bank to the roadway, just in time to catch the package flung her 'by the driver. With a quick movement she broke the seal, hesitated a moment before unfolding the letter, then decided to look it through.
Not a muscle of her face moved; but Laurent thought he heard the panting of her heart. And the motionless threshers—two bronzes rose-tinged in the half-light of the barn, bathed in a sweat more volatile than liquid—the threshers waited for the news with a certain solemnity. A letter from "our Jan," her brother, the "son of the house," or "my Frans," the betrothed, a soldier at Antwerp? Had he had an unlucky hand in a scuffle, was he languishing in the military hospital, did the letter come from the prison of Vilvorde? Laurent posed all these questions to himself. He burned to ask the young girl. She entered the farmhouse. He would have always to wait for the answer. The diligence pursued its course. The little bells tinkled laughingly on the collars of the horses, the whip cracked without shame; it was tediously hot, one of those noonday heats that make us curse the sun and lament winter. The clock of Calloo rang out its melancholy midday, the most tedious hour
