in it which frightened him. He waited until
he had seen the quackdoctor start for the next parish, then he went
slowly down the street. There were people still about, so he walked on
towards the river. When he returned, the street was empty. Keeping in
the shadow of the trees, he went to Charley's house. There was a light
in a window. He went to the back door and tried it. It was not locked,
and, without knocking, he stepped inside the kitchen. Here was no light,
and he passed into the hallway and on to a little room opening from the
tailorshop. He knocked; then, not waiting for response, opened the door
and entered.

Charley was standing before a mirror, holding a pair of scissors. He
turned abruptly, and said forbiddingly: "I am at my toilet!"

Then, turning again to the mirror, with a shrug of the shoulders, he
raised the shears to his beard. Before he could use them, Jo's hand was
on his arm.

"Stop that, M'sieu'!" he said huskily.

Charley had drunk nearly a whole bottle of cheap whiskey within an hour.
He was intoxicated, but, as had ever been the case with him, his brain
was working clearly, his hand was steady; he was in that wide dream
of clear-seeing and clear-knowing which, in old days, had given him
glimpses of the real life from which, in the egotism of the non-intime,
he had been shut out. Looking at Jo now, he was possessed by a composed
intoxication like that in which he had moved during that last night at
the Cote Dorion.

But now, with the baleful crust of egotism gone, with every nerve of
life exposed, with conscience struggling to its feet from the torpor of
thirty-odd vacant years, he was as two men in one, with different lives
and different souls, yet as inseparable in their misery as those poor
victims of Gallic tyranny, chained back to back and thrown into the
Seine.

Jo's words, insistent and eager, suddenly roused in him some old memory,
which stayed his hand.

"Why should I stop?" he asked quietly, and smiling that smile which had
infuriated the river-drivers at the Cote Dorion.

"Are you going back, M'sieu?"

"Back where?" Charley's eyes were fixed on Jo with a penetrating
intensity, heightened to a strange abstraction, as though he saw not Jo
alone, but something great distances beyond.

Jo did not answer this question directly. "Some one came to-day--he is
gone; some one may come to-morrow--and stay," he said meaningly.

Charley went over to the fire and sat down on a bench, o