ings. What
was in his mind was also passing through that of the river-driver and a
few of his friends, and they carefully watched the route he was taking.

Jean Jacques prepared to depart. He had ever loved to be the centre of a
picture, but here was a time when to be in the centre was torture. Eyes
of morbid curiosity were looking at the open wounds of his heart-ragged
wounds made by the shrapnel of tragedy and treachery, not the clean
wounds got in a fair fight, easily healed. For the moment at least the
little egoist was a mere suffering soul--an epitome of shame, misery and
disappointment. He must straightway flee the place where he was tied to
the stake of public curiosity and scorn. He drew the reins tighter, and
the horses straightened to depart. Then it was that old Judge Carcasson
laid a hand on his knee.

"Come, come," he said to the dejected and broken little man, "where is
your philosophy?"

Jean Jacques looked at the Judge, as though with a new-born suspicion
that henceforth the world would laugh at him, and that Judge Carcasson
was setting the fashion; but seeing a pitying moisture in the other's
eyes, he drew himself up, set his jaw, and calling on all the forces at
his command, he said:

"Moi je suis philosophe!"

His voice frayed a little on the last word, but his head was up now.
The Clerk of the Court would have asked to accompany him to the Manor
Cartier, but he was not sure that Jean Jacques would like it. He had a
feeling that Jean Jacques would wish to have his dark hour alone. So
he remained silent, and Jean Jacques touched his horses with the whip.
After starting, however, and having been followed for a hundred yards
or so by the pitying murmurs and a few I-told-you-so's and revilings for
having married as he did, Jean Jacques stopped the ponies. Standing up
in the red wagon he looked round for someone whom, for a moment, he did
not see in the slowly shifting crowd.

Philosophy was all very well, and he had courageously given his
allegiance to it, or a formula of it, a moment before; but there was
something deeper and rarer still in the little man's soul. His heart
hungered for the two women who had been the joy and pride of his life,
even when he had been lost in the business of the material world. They
were more to him than he had ever known; they were parts of himself
which had slowly developed, as the features and characteristics of
ancestors gradually emerge and are emphasized in a d