ely: "Take the tray back
to Madame Dauphin--please."

She flashed a glance of inquiry at him. She was puzzled by the fire in
his eyes. With her soul in her face as she lifted the tray, out of the
warm-beating life in her, she said in a low tone:

"It is good to live, isn't it?"

He nodded and smiled, and the trouble slowly passed from his eyes. The
woman in her had conquered his enemy.

CHAPTER XXXV. THE COMING OF MAXIMILIAN COUR AND ANOTHER

"It is good to live, isn't it?" In the autumn weather when the air drank
like wine, it seemed so indeed, even to Charley, who worked all day in
his shop, his door wide open to the sunlight, and sat up half the night
with Narcisse Dauphin, sometimes even taking a turn at the cradle of the
twins, while madame sat beside her husband's bed.

To Charley the answer to Rosalie's question lay in the fact that his
eyes had never been so keen, his face so alive, or his step so buoyant
as in this week of double duty. His mind was more hopeful than it had
ever been since the day he awoke with memory restored in the silence of
a mountain hut.

He had found the antidote to his great temptation, to the lurking,
relentless habit which had almost killed him the night John Brown
had sung Champagne Charlie from behind the flaring lights. From a
determination to fight his own fight with no material aids, he had never
once used the antidote sent him by the Cure's brother.

On St. Jean Baptiste's day his proud will had failed him; intellectual
force, native power of mind, had broken like reeds under the weight of
a cruel temptation. But now a new force had entered into him. As his
fingers were about to reach for the spirit-bottle in the house of the
Notary, and he had, for the first time in his life, made an appeal for
help, a woman's voice had said, "It is good to live, isn't it?" and his
hand was stayed. A woman's look had stilled the strife. Never before in
his life had he relied on a moral or a spiritual impulse in him. What
of these existed in him were in unseen quantities--for which there was
neither multiple nor measure--had been primitive and hereditary, flowing
in him like a feeble tincture diluted to inefficacy.

Rosalie had resolved him back to the original elements. The quiet days
he had spent in Chaudiere, the self-sacrifice he had been compelled to
make, the human sins, such as those of Jo Portugais and Louis Trudel,
with which he had had to do, the simplicity of the life a