gatory. But all the same--after forty years' faithful
service--and not to mention in the will--_meme pour une Bretonne,
c'etait raide_. Jeanne agreed. She had no reason to love her Aunt
Morin. Her father's people came from Agen on the confines of Gascony;
he had been a man of great gestures and vehement speech; her mother,
gentle, reserved, _un pen devote_. Jeanne drew her character from
both sources; but her sympathies were rather southern than northern.
For some reason or the other, perhaps for his expansive ways--who
knows?--Aunt Morin had held the late Monsieur Bossiere in
detestation. She had no love for Jeanne, and Jeanne, who before her
good fortune had expected nothing from Aunt Morin, regarded the will
with feelings of indifference. Except as far as it concerned Toinette.
Forty years' faithful service deserved recognition. But what was the
use of talking about it?

"So we must separate, Toinette?"

"Alas, yes, mademoiselle--unless mademoiselle would come with me to
Paimpol."

Jeanne laughed. What should she do in Paimpol? There wasn't even a
fisherman left there to fall in love with.

"Mademoiselle," said Toinette later, "do you think you will meet the
little English soldier, Monsieur Trevor, in Paris?"

"_Dans la guerre on ne se revoit jamais_," said Jeanne.

But there was more of personal decision than of fatalism in her tone.

So Jeanne waited for a day or two until the regiment marched away, and
then, with heavy heart, set out for Paris. She wrote, indeed, to
Phineas, and weeks afterwards Phineas, who was in the thick of the
Somme fighting, wrote to Doggie telling him of her departure from
Frelus; but regretted that as he had lost her letter he could not
give him her Paris address.

And in the meantime the house of Gaspard Morin was shuttered and
locked and sealed; and the bureaucratically minded old Postmaster of
Frelus, who had received no instructions from Jeanne to forward her
correspondence, handed Doggie's letters and telegrams to the aged
postman, a superannuated herdsman, who stuck them into the letter-box
of the deserted house and went away conscious of duty perfectly
accomplished.

Then, at last, Doggie, fit again for active service, went out with a
draft to France, and joined Phineas and Mo, almost the only survivors
of the cheery, familiar crowd that he had loved, and the grimness of
battles such as he had never conceived possible took him in its
inexorable grip, and he lost sense of