t to me."

"All? But there is your sister, the dear Miss Janet."

Miss Anne's eyes were hidden in her handkerchief. "My poor sister died
last year, Mr. Pujol."

"I am very sorry. I did not know," said Aristide gently.

There was a short silence. "It was a great sorrow to you," he said.

"It was God's will," said Anne. Then, after another pause, during which
she dried her eyes, she strove to smile. "Tell me about yourself. How do
you come to be here?"

Aristide replied in a hesitating way. He was in the presence of grief
and sickness and trouble; the Provencal braggadocio dropped from him and
he became the simple and childish creature that he was. He accounted
very truthfully, very convincingly, for his queer life; for his
abandonment of little Jean, for his silence, for his sudden and
unexpected appearance. During the ingenuous _apologia pro vita sua_ Miss
Anne regarded him with her honest candour.

"Janet and I both understood," she said. "Janet was gifted with a divine
comprehension and pity. The landlady at the hotel, I remember, said some
unkind things about you; but we didn't believe them. We felt that you
were a good man--no one but a good man could have written that
letter--we cried over it--and when she tried to poison our minds we said
to each other: 'What does it matter? Here God in his mercy has given us
a child.' But, Mr. Pujol, why didn't you take us into your confidence?"

"My dear Miss Anne," said Aristide, "we of the South do things
impulsively, by lightning flashes. An idea comes suddenly. _Vlan!_ we
carry it out in two seconds. We are not less human than the Northerner,
who reflects two months."

"That is almost what dear, wise Janet told me," said Miss Anne.

"Then you know in your heart," said Aristide, after a while, "that if I
had not been only a football at the feet of fortune, I should never have
deserted little Jean?"

"I do, Mr. Pujol. My sister and I have been footballs, too." She added
with a change of tone: "You tell me you saw our dear home at
Chislehurst?"

"Yes," said Aristide.

"And you see this. There is a difference."

"What has happened?" asked Aristide.

She told him the commonplace pathetic story. Their father had left them
shares in the company of which he had been managing director. For many
years they had enjoyed a comfortable income. Then the company had become
bankrupt and only a miserable ninety pounds a year had been saved from
the wreckage. The cottage at