mall farmer and kinsman of Jean Jacques, who sold whisky--"white
whisky"--without a license. It was a Charron family habit to sell
liquor illegally, and Louis pursued the career with all an amateur's
enthusiasm. He had a sovereign balm for "colds," composed of camomile
flowers, boneset, liquorice, pennyroyal and gentian root, which he sold
to all comers; and it was not unnatural that a visitor with weak lungs
should lodge with him.

Louis and his wife had only good things to say about Gerard Fynes; for
the young man lived their life as though he was born to it. He ate the
slap-jacks, the buttermilk-pop, the pork and beans, the Indian corn on
the cob, the pea-soup, and the bread baked in the roadside oven, with a
relish which was not all pretence; for indeed he was as primitive as he
was subtle. He himself could not have told how much of him was true and
how much was make-believe. But he was certainly lovable, and he was not
bad by nature. Since coming to St. Saviour's he had been constant to one
attraction, and he had not risked his chances with Zoe by response to
the shy invitations of dark eyes, young and not so young, which met his
own here and there in the parish.

Only M. Fille and Jean Jacques himself had feelings of real antagonism
to him. Jean Jacques, though not naturally suspicious, had, however,
seen an understanding look pass between his Zoe and this stranger--this
Protestant English stranger from the outer world, to which Jean Jacques
went less frequently since his fruitless search for his vanished Carmen.
The Clerk of the Court saw that Jean Jacques had observed the intimate
glances of the two young people, and their eyes met in understanding. It
was just before Zoe had sung so charmingly, 'Oh, Who Will Walk the Wood
With Me'.

At first after Carmen's going Jean Jacques had found it hard to endure
singing in his house. Zoe's trilling was torture to him, though he had
never forbidden her to sing, and she had sung on to her heart's content.
By a subtle instinct, however, and because of the unspoken sorrow in her
own heart, she never sang the songs like 'La Manola'. Never after the
day Carmen went did Zoe speak of her mother to anyone at all. It was
worse than death; it was annihilation, so far as speech was concerned.
The world at large only knew that Carmen Barbille had run away, and that
even Sebastian Dolores her father did not know where she was. The old
man had not heard from her, and he seldom visite