and afterward the new home with a bigger
stoop than any other in the village, with some old, gnarled
crab-apple-trees and lilac bushes, and four years of happiness, and a
little child that died; and all the time Jacques rising in the esteem of
Michelin the lumber-king, and sent on inspections, and to organize camps;
for weeks, sometimes for months, away from the house behind the lilac
bushes--and then the end of it all, sudden and crushing and unredeemable.

Jacques came back one night and found the house empty. Marcile had gone to
try her luck with another man.

That was the end of the upward career of Jacques Grassette. He went out
upon a savage hunt which brought him no quarry, for the man and the woman
had disappeared as completely as though they had been swallowed by the
sea. And here, at last, he was waiting for the day when he must settle a
bill for a human life taken in passion and rage.

His big frame seemed out of place in the small cell, and the watcher
sitting near him, to whom he had not addressed a word nor replied to a
question since the watching began, seemed an insignificant factor in the
scene. Never had a prisoner been more self-contained, or rejected more
completely all those ministrations of humanity which relieve the horrible
isolation of the condemned cell. Grassette's isolation was complete. He
lived in a dream, did what little there was to do in a dark abstraction,
and sat hour after hour, as he was sitting now, piercing, with a brain at
once benumbed to all outer things and afire with inward things, those
realms of memory which are infinite in a life of forty years.

"_Sacre!_" he muttered at last, and a shiver seemed to pass through him
from head to foot; then an ugly and evil oath fell from his lips, which
made his watcher shrink back appalled, for he also was a Catholic, and had
been chosen of purpose, in the hope that he might have an influence on
this revolted soul. It had, however, been of no use, and Grassette had
refused the advances and ministrations of the little good priest, Father
Laflamme, who had come from the coast of purpose to give him the offices
of the Church. Silent, obdurate, sullen, he had looked the priest straight
in the face, and had said, in broken English, "_Non_, I pay my bill. _Nom
de diable!_ I will say my own Mass, light my own candle, go my own way. I
have too much."

Now, as he sat glooming, after his outbreak of oaths, there came a
rattling noise at the doo