't answer. However, there is one
point, Simon, on which I ask you to tell me the absolute truth. I can
look you straight in the face, can I not? There is not in the depths
of your being a single memory that comes between us? . . . Not a
weakness? . . . Not a disloyal thought?"

He pressed her to him and, with his lips on hers, said:

"There's you, Isabel, and you alone: you in the past and you in the
future."

"I believe you, Simon," she declared.

The wedding took place a month later; and they went to live in the
wreck of the _Ville de Dunkerque_, the official residence of the
French high commissioner of the new territories.

It was here that the draft agreement was signed, in accordance with
Simon Dubosc's proposal and his preliminary investigations, for the
great canal which was to bisect the Isthmus of Normandy, allotting to
each country, right and left, an almost equal portion of land.

Here too was signed the solemn covenant by which Great Britain and
France declared eternal friendship and laid the foundations of the
United States of Europe.

And it was here that four children were born to Isabel and Simon.

In after years, Simon often went on horseback or by aeroplane,
accompanied by his wife, to visit his friend Edward Rolleston. When he
had recovered from his wounds, Rolleston set to work and became the
manager of a large fishing-industry on the new English coast, in which
he employed Antonio. Rolleston married. The Indian lived alone for a
long time, waiting for her who never came and of whom no one ever
spoke. But one day he received a letter and went away. Some months
later, he wrote from Mexico announcing his marriage to Dolores.

But Isabel and Simon's favourite walk led them to Old Sandstone's
house. He lived in a little bungalow, close to the prehistoric
dwelling by the lake, where he pursued his researches into the new
land. The showers of gold, now exhausted, no longer interested him;
moreover, the problem had been solved. But what an indecipherable
riddle was this building, standing on a site of the Eocene period!

"There were apes in those days," Old Sandstone declared. "There's no
doubt of that. But men! And men capable of building, of ornamenting
their dwellings of carving stone! No, I confess this is a phenomenon
which unsettles all one's ideas. What do you make of it, Simon?"

Simon made no reply. A boat was rocking on the lake. He took his place
in it with Isabel and rowed with a ca