ame to render
yourself so odiously notorious in Brittany."

"Ah, not odiously, monsieur!"

"Certainly, odiously--among those that matter. It is said even that you
were Omnes Omnibus, though that I cannot, will not believe."

"Yet it is true."

M. de Kercadiou choked. "And you confess it? You dare to confess it?"

"What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess--unless he is a
coward."

"Oh, and to be sure you were very brave, running away each time after
you had done the mischief, turning comedian to hide yourself, doing more
mischief as a comedian, provoking a riot in Nantes, and then running
away again, to become God knows what--something dishonest by the affluent
look of you. My God, man, I tell you that in these past two years I have
hoped that you were dead, and you profoundly disappoint me that you
are not!" He beat his hands together, and raised his shrill voice to
call--"Benoit!" He strode away towards the fireplace, scarlet in the
face, shaking with the passion into which he had worked himself. "Dead,
I might have forgiven you, as one who had paid for his evil, and his
folly. Living, I never can forgive you. You have gone too far. God alone
knows where it will end.

"Benoit, the door. M. Andre-Louis Moreau to the door!" The tone argued
an irrevocable determination. Pale and self-contained, but with a queer
pain at his heart, Andre-Louis heard that dismissal, saw Benoit's
white, scared face and shaking hands half-raised as if he were about
to expostulate with his master. And then another voice, a crisp, boyish
voice, cut in.

"Uncle!" it cried, a world of indignation and surprise in its pitch,
and then: "Andre!" And this time a note almost of gladness, certainly of
welcome, was blended with the surprise that still remained.

Both turned, half the room between them at the moment, and beheld Aline
in one of the long, open windows, arrested there in the act of entering
from the garden, Aline in a milk-maid bonnet of the latest mode, though
without any of the tricolour embellishments that were so commonly to be
seen upon them.

The thin lips of Andre's long mouth twisted into a queer smile. Into his
mind had flashed the memory of their last parting. He saw himself again,
standing burning with indignation upon the pavement of Nantes, looking
after her carriage as it receded down the Avenue de Gigan.

She was coming towards him now with outstretched hands, a heightened
colour in her cheeks, a smile of