he street door of the post-office. When she had finished, Charley
went back into the room where Rosalie sat beside the sick man's couch,
the hound at her feet. She came forward, surprised, for he had bade her
good-bye but a few minutes before.

"May I sit and watch for an hour longer, Mademoiselle?" he said. "You
will have your duties in the post-office."

"Monsieur--it is good of you," she answered.

For two hours Charley watched her going in and out, whispering
directions to Mrs. Flynn, doing household duty, bringing warmth in with
her, and leaving light behind her.

It was afternoon when he returned to his bench in the tailor-shop, and
was received by old Louis Trudel in peevish silence. For an hour they
worked in silence, and then the tailor said:

"A brave girl--that. We will work till nine to-night!"

CHAPTER XV. THE MARK IN THE PAPER

Chaudiere was nearing the last of its nine-days' wonder. It had filed
past the doorway of the tailor-shop; it had loitered on the other side
of the street; it had been measured for more clothes than in three
months past--that it might see Charley at work in the shop, cross-legged
on a bench, or wielding the goose, his eye glass in his eye. Here was
sensation indeed, for though old M. Rossignol, the Seigneur, had an
eye-glass, it was held to his eye--a large bone-bound thing with a
little gold handle; but no one in Chaudiere had ever worn a glass in
his eye like that. Also, no one in Chaudiere had ever looked quite like
"M'sieu'"--for so it was that, after the first few days (a real tribute
to his importance and sign of the interest he created) Charley came to
be called "M'sieu'," and the Mallard was at last entirely dropped.

Presently people came and stood at the tailor's door and talked, or
listened to Louis Trudel and M'sieu' talking. And it came to be noised
abroad that the stranger talked as well as the Cure and better than the
Notary. By-and-by they associated his eye-glass with his talent, so that
it seemed, as it were, to be the cause of it. Yet their talk was ever of
simple subjects, of everyday life about them, now and then of politics,
occasionally of the events of the world filtered to them through vast
tracts of country. There was one subject which, however, was barred;
perhaps because there was knowledge abroad that M'sieu' was not
a Catholic, perhaps because Charley himself adroitly changed the
conversation when it veered that way.

Though the parish h