ife with Garron--of all
its miserly hardships. "They have given me nothing--" she sobbed
aloud--"nothing."

"Five hundred francs would save him!" she told herself. She caught her
breath, then little by little again the motherly warmth stole up into
her breast deadening for the moment the pain of her jealousy. She
straightened to her full height, squaring her broad shoulders like a man
and stepped across to the wall.

"It is as much mine as it is his," she said between her teeth.

She ran her arm into the hole in the wall, lifted the heavy plank and
drew out a knitted sock tied with a stout string. From the toe she drew
out Garron's fortune.

"He shall have it--the _gosse_--" she said, "and the rest--is as much
mine as it is his."

She thrust the package in her breast.

Half an hour later Julie stood, scarcely breathing, her ear to the
locked door of his _gabion_.

"A pretty lot you came from," she overheard the girl say, "that old cat
would sooner see you go to jail." The rest of her words were half lost
in the rush and suck of the tide slipping out from the _gabion's_ outer
jacket of boards. The heavy chain clinked taut with the pull of the
outgoing tide, then relaxed in the back rush of water.

"Bah!" she heard him reply, "they are pigs, those peasants. I was a fool
to have gone to them for help."

"You had better have gone to the old man," taunted the girl, "as I told
you at first."

"He is made of the same miserly grizzle as she," he retorted hotly.
Again the outrush of the tide drowned their words.

Julie clenched her red fists and drew a long breath. A sudden frenzy
seized her. Before she realized what she was doing, she had crawled in
the mud on her hands and knees to the heavy picket. Here she waited
until the backward rush again slackened the chain, then she half drew
the iron pin that held the last link. Half drew it! Had the girl been
alone, she told herself, she would have given her to the ebb tide.

Julie rose to her feet and turned back across the marsh, unconscious
that the last link was nearly free and that the jerk and pull of the
outgoing tide was little by little freeing the pin from the link.

She kept on her way, towards a hidden wood road that led down to the
marsh at the far end of Pont du Sable and beyond.

She was done with the locality forever. Garron's money was still in her
breast.

* * * * *

At the first glimmer of dawn the next morning, t