tery surrounded the place: in summer the grass was rank,
the trees seemed huddled together in gloom about the houses, the vines
appeared to ooze on the walls, and at one end, where the window-shutters
were always closed and barred, a great willow drooped and shivered; in
winter the stone walls showed naked and grim among the gaunt trees and
furtive shrubs.

None who ever saw the Seigneur could forget him--a tall figure with
stooping shoulders; a pale, deeply lined, clean-shaven face, and a
forehead painfully white, with blue veins showing; the eyes handsome,
penetrative, brooding, and made indescribably sorrowful by the dark
skin around them. There were those in Pontiac, such as the Cure, who
remembered when the Seigneur was constantly to be seen in the village;
and then another person was with him always, a tall, handsome youth, his
son. They were fond and proud of each other, and were religious and good
citizens in a highbred, punctilious way.

At that time the Seigneur was all health and stalwart strength. But one
day a rumour went abroad that he had quarrelled with his son because
of the wife of Farette the miller. No one outside knew if the thing was
true, but Julie, the miller's wife, seemed rather to plume herself that
she had made a stir in her little world. Yet the curious habitants came
to know that the young man had gone, and after a few years his having
once lived there had become a mere memory. But whenever the Little
Chemist set foot inside the tall porch he remembered; the Avocat was
kept in mind by papers which he was called upon to read and alter from
time to time; the Cure never forgot, because when the young man went he
lost not one of his flock but two; and Medallion, knowing something
of the story, had wormed a deal of truth out of the miller's wife.
Medallion knew that the closed, barred rooms were the young man's; and
he knew also that the old man was waiting, waiting, in a hope which he
never even named to himself.

One day the silent old housekeeper came rapping at Medallion's door, and
simply said to him: "Come--the Seigneur!"

Medallion went, and for hours sat beside the Seigneur's chair, while
the Little Chemist watched and sighed softly in a corner, now and
again rising to feel the sick man's pulse or to prepare a cordial. The
housekeeper hovered behind the high-backed chair, and when the Seigneur
dropped his handkerchief--now, as always, of the exquisite fashion of a
past century--she p