ofore--one could make
little difference; and though Jacques was a very good match, considering
his prospects and his favour with the lumber-king, Valloir had a kind
of fear of him, and could not easily promise his beloved Marcile,
the flower of his flock, to a man of whom the priest so strongly
disapproved. But it was a new sort of Jacques Grassette who, that
morning, spoke to him with the simplicity and eagerness of a child; and
the suddenly conceived gift of a pony stallion, which every man in the
parish envied Jacques, won Valloir over; and Jacques went "away back"
with the first timid kiss of Marcile Valloir burning on his cheek.

"Well, bagosh, you are a wonder!" said Jacques' father, when he told him
the news, and saw Jacques jump into the carriole and drive away.

Here in prison, this, too, Jacques saw--this scene; and then the wedding
in the spring, and the tour through the parishes for days together,
lads and lasses journeying with them; and afterwards the new home with
a bigger stoop than any other in the village, with some old gnarled
crab-apple trees and lilac bushes, and four years of happiness, and a
little child that died; and all the time Jacques rising in the esteem
of Michelin the lumber-king, and sent on inspections, and to organise
camps; for weeks, sometimes for months, away from the house behind
the lilac bushes--and then the end of it all, sudden and crushing and
unredeemable.

Jacques came back one night and found the house empty. Marcile had gone
to try her luck with another man.

That was the end of the upward career of Jacques Grassette. He went
out upon a savage hunt which brought him no quarry, for the man and the
woman had disappeared as completely as though they had been swallowed
by the sea. And here, at last, he was waiting for the day when he must
settle a bill for a human life taken in passion and rage.

His big frame seemed out of place in the small cell, and the watcher
sitting near him, to whom he had not addressed a word nor replied to a
question since the watching began, seemed an insignificant factor in the
scene. Never had a prisoner been more self-contained, or rejected
more completely all those ministrations of humanity which relieve the
horrible isolation of the condemned cell. Grassette's isolation was
complete. He lived in a dream, did what little there was to do in a dark
abstraction, and sat hour after hour, as he was sitting now, piercing,
with a brain at once benum