e and championship. Some one in
the crowd turned to him and asked him to say the verses. At first he
would not; but when Caroche said that it was only his fun, that he meant
nothing against Francois, the young man recited the words slowly--an
epitaph on one who was little better than a prize-fighter, a splendid
bully.

Leaning a hand against the white shaft of the Patriot's Memory, he said:

"Blows I have struck, and blows a-many taken,
Wrestling I've fallen, and I've rose up again;
Mostly I've stood--
I've had good bone and blood;
Others went down, though fighting might and main.
Now death steps in--
Death the price of sin.
The fall it will be his; and though I strive and strain,
One blow will close my eyes, and I shall never waken."

"Good enough for Ba'tiste," said Duclosse the mealman.

The wave of feeling was now altogether with Francois, and presently
he walked away with Jeanne Marchand and her mother, and the crowd
dispersed. Jeanne was very happy for a few hours, but in the evening
she was unhappy, for she saw Francois going towards the house of the
Seigneur; and during many weeks she was still more unhappy, for every
three or four days she saw the same thing.

Meanwhile Francois worked as he had never before worked in his life.
Night and day he was shut in his shop, and for two months he came with
no epitaphs for the Cure, and no new tombstones were set up in the
graveyard. The influence of the lady at the Seigneury was upon him, and
he himself believed it was for his salvation. She had told him of great
pieces of sculpture she had seen, had sent and got from Quebec City,
where he had never been, pictures of some of the world's masterpieces
in sculpture, and he had lost himself in the study of them and in the
depths of the girl's eyes. She meant no harm; the man interested her
beyond what was reasonable in one of his station in life. That was all,
and all there ever was.

Presently people began to gossip, and a story crept round that, in a new
shed which he had built behind his shop, Francois was chiselling out of
stone the nude figure of a woman. There were one or two who professed
they had seen it. The wildest gossip said that the figure was that
of the young lady at the Seigneury. Francois saw no more of Jeanne
Marchand; he thought of her sometimes, but that was all. A fever of work
was on him. Twice she came to the shed