As long as she was boiling water for supper, she also heated some for the bathroom down at the end of the hall. The children were old enough now that she couldn't bathe them together any more. That meant going down the hall first with Mary Jane, then with George, Jr., and last by herself. By the time she got to use the tub, she could hardly tell any hot water had ever gone into it.

That meant she bathed as fast as she could. Then she got out, threw on a robe, wrapped her wet hair in a towel, and hurried back to her flat. It was just as well that she did; she found the children doing their best to kill each other. Size favored George, Jr., ferocity and long fingernails Mary Jane.

"Can't I leave the two of you alone for five minutes?" Sylvia demanded, despite the answer obviously being no. She did her best to get to the bottom of what had started the brawl. The children told diametrically opposite stories. She might have known they would. She had known they would. This time, she couldn't sort out who was lying, or whether they both thought they were telling the truth. With fine impartiality, she whacked both their bottoms.

"I hate you!'" Mary Jane screamed. "I hate you even worse than I hate him." She pointed to George, Jr.

Ignoring his sister, he told Sylvia, "I'm never going to speak to you again as long as I live." He'd made that threat before, and once made good on it for a solid half hour: long enough to unnerve her.

She went into the bedroom and looked at her alarm clock. "It's after eight," she said. "You both need to get ready for bed." That produced more impassioned protests from the children; George, Jr., abandoned silence so he could squawk his head off. It did him no good. In fifteen minutes, he and Mary Jane were both in bed, and asleep very shortly after that.

Sylvia sat down on the couch with a weary sigh. She would have to go to bed pretty soon herself. When she got up, all she had to look forward to was another day at the galoshes factory. Life was supposed to be better than that, wasn't it?

Life would have been better-she was sure of it-had George lived. Then he would have been going out to sea, true, and complaining about the drudgery when he was back on land. But, no matter how hard the work was, he'd liked it. Sylvia wouldn't have liked making galoshes even had Frank Best not bothered her whenever he wasn't bothering someone else. It was only a job, something she did to keep food on the table. She wished she could quit.

She sighed again. She was trapped. The only difference between her and a mouse in a trap was that her back wasn't broken… yet. "If I had that limey submersible skipper here," she said, "I'd shoot him right between the eyes. What the hell was he doing in that part of the Atlantic?" She didn't own a pistol; George hadn't kept one in the flat. She would gladly have learned to shoot one, though, if she could have avenged herself on that Englishman. She shook her head. For all she knew, the King of England had pinned a medal on him. If there was any justice in the world, she had a devil of a time seeing where.

A nasty wind blew snow into Lucien Galtier's face. He pulled down his hat and yanked up the collar of his coat as he made his slow way from the farmhouse to the barn. His way had to be slow; because of the snow, he could hardly tell where the barn lay. But his feet knew.

He accepted Quebec winter with the resignation of a man who had never known and scarcely imagined anything different. Moving to a warmer climate had never crossed his mind. Quebec boasted no warmer climates. Besides, moving would have taken him off the land his family had farmed since the seventeenth century. He was less likely to leave his patrimony than he was to leave his wife, and never once in all the years since the priest joined them together had he had any thought of leaving Marie.

When he got to the barn, he let out a sigh of relief. The horse snorted, hearing him come in. It was not a snort of friendly greeting, in spite of all the hours of conversation that had passed between the two of them as they traveled the roads around the farm. No, the only thing that snort meant was, Where's my breakfast, and what kept you so long?

"Compose yourself in patience, greedy beast," Galtier said. The horse snorted again. It was not about to compose itself in patience, or any other way. It wanted hay and it wanted oats and it wanted them right this second.

He fed all the livestock and cleaned up the muck. By the time he was done with that, the muscles in the small of his back were complaining. Why didn 'tyou send out Georges or Charles? was what they were complaining. He did do that a lot of the time, but they were busy elsewhere this morning.

"And," he said, speaking to his muscles as if they were the horse, and therefore incapable of talking back, "I am not in my dotage. If I cannot do this work, what good am I?" But it was not that he couldn't do the work. It was that doing the work exacted its price these days, and the price went up with the years.

He went back out into the cold, back to the farmhouse. Once he got close to it, he whistled in surprise. Dr. Leonard O'Doull's Ford was parked by the house. Even though his son-in-law worked at the hospital on Galtier land, he didn't come to visit all that often. Lucien picked up his pace, to see why O'Doull had come today.

"Bonjour, mon beau-pere" O'Doull said, rising to shake his hand. Marie had already given the young doctor a cup of coffee and a sweet roll.

"Bonjour" Lucien said. "My daughter and my grandson, I trust they are well?"

"Yes," O'Doull said, and Marie nodded: she must have asked the same question. The American went on, "I have come, as I was beginning to tell your wife before you got here, to ask a favor of you."

"Vraiment?" Lucien said in some surprise. O'Doull was an independent fellow, and the favors he asked few and far between. Galtier waved his arms. "Well, if you came here to do that, you'd better get on with it, don't you think?"

"Yes, certainly." But O'Doull hesitated again before finally continuing, "My mother and father have decided they would like to come up to Quebec to see their first grandson. You know our house, and know that it is not of the largest. Is it-would it be- possible that you might put them up here for a few days' visit? If it cannot be done, you must know I will understand, but it would be good if it could."

Before answering, Galtier glanced toward Marie. The farmhouse was her province. He knew there would be disruption, but she was the one to gauge how much. Only after she gave him a tiny nod did he answer in effusive tones: "But of course! They would be most welcome. When would they be traveling up to see you?"

"In a couple of weeks, if that's all right," O'Doull answered. "They're so looking forward to meeting Nicole and seeing little Lucien and to meeting all of you, for your doings have filled the pages of our letters."

"I hope we are not so bad as you will have made us out to be," Galtier said.

While Leonard O'Doull was still figuring out how to take that, Marie asked, "Is it that your mother and father speak French?"

"My father does, some," O'Doull replied. "He is a doctor himself, and studied French in college. My mother has been trying to learn since I decided to live here, but I do not know how much she has picked up."

"We will get along," Galtier said in his rusty English. Then he had to translate for his wife. Marie nodded, though she had almost no English of her own.

"I thank you very much," O'Doull said with a nod of his own that was almost a bow. "I will wire them and tell them it is arranged. Truly, they do want to meet you. I will also, naturally, let you know when I hear just when they will arrive in Riviere-du-Loup." With one more nod, he went back to his motorcar and then back to the hospital.