after all! Actually in his pocket he
carried his release ticket, ready dated. His ship lay in harbor. His
sentence expired some few days off. A step would take him into the
night. He had simply to keep safe within police limits until the hour of
sailing and march himself freely on board. And then ... he had won! You
see? By his theory the world would open before him the most radiant of
welcomes. By his faith he would have his life-long arrears to collect:
his gorgeous dreams to realize. One must have been a felon--one must
have eaten his heart in prison cells--and even in this widest and
farthest of prison cells with its wall of painted horizons none the
less alien and inexorable--to feel what those dreams meant to him.

Now again, as before, he had only to get himself off stage: he needed
only the boldness to break once for all with the thief's part--as he
himself had said: the selfishness to stand to his game--as Mother Carron
put it!

And in truth what was hindering him? No actual compulsion: none he need
fear. Only impalpable things. Shame. Uncertainty, timidity, regret. The
pressures of personality. The qualms of a poor juggler with life:
fearful of missing--fearful of not seizing it featly.... Cobwebs all!

What he would have done about it the good God can tell. I have asked
myself often enough. But he hesitated a bit too long: that little fool
of fortune with his face of a rubber puppet squeezed by fate. Next
moment the cue had been taken from him, for across the pause ran a thin,
keen whistle. Mother Carron spun around. And as if dispatched on that
breath--through the key-hole, perhaps--there blew in suddenly among us
from the back of the house somewhere a tiny, gray-faced, white-haired
wraith of a man.

"Well--idiot?... What's up now?"

From her greeting, as from the blurred effacement of the apparition
himself, one divined without trouble the person of that former
redoubtable housebreaker: Carron. In a voice scarcely above the singing
of the kettle he made his announcement.

"There are two coming by the road."

"Hey?" she bawled. "What two?"

"A priest and another."

Mother Carron smiled the only smile to pass upon her wintry front that
night: she spread her hands before us.

"Enfin! What did I tell you? And in great good time, my word!... You
hear that--you others?... Go and welcome Father Anselm, fool! And fetch
out the wine, if you are able to stir your pins!"

The shadow sighed.

"It is not