tte!_" cried Aristide, with a fine flourish, "let them talk!"

"Against Jean and myself?"

The reproach brought him to his feet. "No," said he. "No. Sooner than
they should talk, I would go out and strangle every one of them. But it
is infamous. What do they say?"

"How can I tell you? What would they say in your own country?"

"France is France and England is England."

"And a little cackling village is the same all the world over. No, my
dear friend--for you are my dear friend--you must go back to London, for
the sake of my good name and Jean's."

"But let us leave the cackling village."

"There are geese on every common," said Anne.

"_Nom de Dieu!_" muttered Aristide, walking about the tiny parlour.
"_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_" He stood in front of her and flung out
his arms wide. "But without Jean and you life will have no meaning for
me. I shall die. I shall fade away. I shall perish. Tell me, dear Miss
Anne, what they are saying, the miserable peasants with souls of mud."

But Anne could tell him no more. It had been hateful and degrading to
tell him so much. She shivered through all her purity. After a barren
discussion she held out her hand, large and generous like herself.

"Good-bye"--she hesitated for the fraction of a second--"Good-bye,
Aristide. I promise you shall provide for Jean's future. I will bring
him up to London now and then to see you. We will find some way out of
the difficulty. But you see, don't you, that you must leave Beverly
Stoke?"

Aristide went back to his comfortless lodgings aflame with bewilderment,
indignation and despair. He fell upon Mrs. Buttershaw, a slatternly and
sour-visaged woman, and hurled at her a tornado of questions. She
responded with the glee of a hag, and Aristide learned the amazing fact
that in the matter of sheer uncharitableness, unkindness and foulness of
thought Beverly Stoke, with its population of three hundred hinds, could
have brought down upon it the righteous indignation of Sodom, Gomorrah,
Babylon, Paris, and London. For a fortnight or so Anne Honeywood's life
in the village had been that of a pariah dog.

"And now you've spoke of it yourself," said Mrs. Buttershaw, her hands
on her hips, "I'm glad. I'm a respectable woman, I am, and go to church
regularly, and I don't want to be mixed up in such goings on. And I
never have held with foreigners, anyway. And the sooner you find other
lodgings, the better."

For the first and only time in