happiness--as much as most of us get, maybe, in a longer course."

"Share! She was worth a hundred years of happiness!" bitterly retorted
Jean Jacques.

"Perhaps she knew her child would have it?" gently remarked the Young
Doctor.

"Ah, that--that!... Do you think that possible, m'sieu'? Tell me, do you
think that was in her mind--to have loved, and been a mother, and given
her life for the child, and then the bosom of God. Answer that to me,
m'sieu'?"

There was intense, poignant inquiry in Jean Jacques' face, and a light
seemed to play over it. The Young Doctor heeded the look and all that
was in the face. It was his mission to heal, and he knew that to heal
the mind was often more necessary than to heal the body. Here he would
try to heal the mind, if only in a little.

"That might well have been in her thought," he answered. "I saw her
face. It had a wonderful look of peace, and a smile that would reconcile
anyone she loved to her going. I thought of that when I looked at her. I
recall it now. It was the smile of understanding."

He had said the only thing which could have comforted Jean Jacques
at that moment. Perhaps it was meant to be that Zoe's child should
represent to him all that he had lost--home, fortune, place, Carmen and
Zoe. Perhaps she would be home again for him and all that home should
mean--be the promise of a day when home would again include that fled
from Carmen, and himself, and Carmen's child. Maybe it was sentiment in
him, maybe it was sentimentality--and maybe it was not.

"Come, m'sieu'," Jean Jacques said impatiently: "let us go to the house
of that M'sieu' Doyle. But first, mark this: I have in the West here
some land--three hundred and twenty acres. It may yet be to me a home,
where I shall begin once more with my Zoe's child--with my Zoe of
Zoe--the home-life I lost down by the Beau Cheval.... Let us go at
once."

"Yes, at once," answered the Young Doctor. Yet his feet were laggard,
for he was not so sure that there would be another home for Jean Jacques
with his grandchild as its star. He was thinking of Norah, to whom a
waif of the prairie had made home what home should be for herself and
Nolan Doyle.

"Read these letters first," he said, and he put the letters found on Zoe
in Jean Jacques' eager hands.

A half-hour later, at the horse-breeding ranch, the Young Doctor
introduced Jean Jacques to Norah Doyle, and instantly left the house. He
had no wish to hear the interview