se of what was decorous and fitting--his memory
travelled over the map of his past life, aye, and even beyond the
boundaries of his own life.

Before him lay spread retrospectively the story of his parents'
uneventful, happy marriage. They had been mated in the good old French
way, that is, up to their wedding morning they had never met save in the
presence of their respective parents. And yet--and yet how devoted they
had been to each other! So completely one in thought, in interest, in
sympathy had they grown that when, after thirty-three years of married
life, his father had died, Jacques' mother had not known how to go on
living. She had slipped out of life a few months later, and as she lay
dying she had used a very curious expression: "My faithful companion is
calling me," she had said to her only child, "and you must not try, dear
son, to make me linger on the way."

Now, to-day, Jacques de Wissant asked himself with perplexed pain and
anger, why it was that his parents had led so peaceful, so dignified, so
wholly contented a married life, while he himself----?

And yet his own marriage had been a love match--or so those about him
had all said with nods and smiles--love marriages having suddenly become
the fashion in the rich provincial world of which he had then been one
of the heirs-apparent.

His old-fashioned mother would have preferred as daughter-in-law any one
of half a dozen girls who belonged to her own good town of Falaise, and
whom she had known from childhood. But Jacques had been difficult to
please, and he was already thirty-two when he had met, by a mere chance,
Claire de Kergouet at her first ball. She was only seventeen, with but
the promise of a beauty which was now in exquisite flower, and he had
decided, there and then, in the course of two hours, that this
demoiselle de Kergouet was alone worthy of becoming Madame Jacques de
Wissant.

And on the whole his prudent parents had blessed his choice, for the
girl was of the best Breton stock, and came of a family famed in the
naval annals of France. Unluckily Claire de Kergouet had had no dowry to
speak of, for her father, the Admiral, had been a spendthrift, and, as
is still the reckless Breton fashion, father of a large family--three
daughters and four sons. But Jacques de Wissant had not allowed his
parents to give the matter of Claire's fortune more than a regretful
thought--indeed, he had done further, he had "recognized" a larger dowry