you want help?" he said, fixing his eyes on the tailor's, steady and
persistent.

"What's the good of wanting--I can't get it," was the irritable reply,
as he uncrossed his legs.

Charley took the iron out of his hand. "I'll press, if you'll show me
how," he said.

"I don't want a fiddling ten-minutes' help like that."

"It isn't fiddling. I'm going to stay, if you think I'll do."

"You are going to stop-every day?" The old man's voice quavered a
little.

"Precisely that." Charley wetted a seam with water as he had often
seen tailors do. He dropped the hot iron on the seam, and sniffed with
satisfaction.

"Who are you?" said the tailor.

"A man who wants work. The Cure knows. It's all right. Shall I stay?"

The tailor nodded, and sat down with a colour in his face.

CHAPTER XIV. ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED

From the moment there came to the post-office the letter addressed to
"The Sick Man at the House of Jo Portugais at Vadrome Mountain," Rosalie
Evanturel dreamed dreams. Mystery, so fascinating a thing in all the
experiences of life, took hold of her. The strange man in the lonely
hut on the hill, the bandaged head, the keen, piercing blue eyes,
the monocle, like a masked battery of the mind, levelled at her--all
appealed to that life she lived apart from the people with whom she had
daily commerce. Her world was a world of books and dreams, and simple,
practical duties of life. Most books were romance to her, for most were
of a life to which she had not been educated. Even one or two purely
Protestant books of missionary enterprise, found in a box in her dead
mother's room, had had all the charms of poetry and adventure. It was
all new, therefore all delightful, even when the Protestant sentiments
shocked her as being not merely untrue, but hurting that aesthetic sense
never remote from the mind of the devout Catholic.

She had blushed when monsieur had first looked at her, in the hut on
Vadrome Mountain, not because there was any soft sentiment about him
in her heart--how could there be for a man she had but just seen!--but
because her feelings, her imagination, were all at high temperature;
because the man compelled attention. The feeling sprang from a deep
sensibility, a natural sense, not yet made incredulous by the ironies
of life. These had never presented themselves to her in a country, in
a parish, where people said of fortune and misfortune, happiness and
sor