Indeed, he got there before six o'clock. And as the evening was
fine, it occurred to Marianne to go as far as the Lepailleurs' mill down
the river, and buy some new-laid eggs there.
"I'm willing," said Mathieu. "I'm very fond of their romantic old mill,
you know; though if it were mine I should pull it down and build another
one with proper appliances."
In the yard of the picturesque old building, half covered with ivy, with
its mossy wheel slumbering amid water-lilies, they found the Lepailleurs,
the man tall, dry, and carroty, the woman as carroty and as dry as
himself, but both of them young and hardy. Their child Antonin was
sitting on the ground, digging a hole with his little hands.
"Eggs?" La Lepailleur exclaimed; "yes, certainly, madame, there must be
some."
She made no haste to fetch them, however, but stood looking at Gervais,
who was asleep in his little vehicle.
"Ah! so that's your last. He's plump and pretty enough, I must say," she
remarked.
But Lepailleur raised a derisive laugh, and with the familiarity which
the peasant displays towards the bourgeois whom he knows to be hard up,
he said: "And so that makes you five, monsieur.
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