on a little knoll under a tree, not far away from
their meeting-place, busy with pencil and paper.

It was Jean Jacques, who had also come to the river-bank to work out a
business problem which must be settled on the morrow. He had stolen out
immediately after supper from neighbours who wished to see him, and had
come here by a roundabout way, because he wished to be alone.

George Masson and Carmen were together for a few moments only, but Jean
Jacques heard his wife say, "Yes, to-morrow--for sure," and then he saw
her kiss the master-carpenter--kiss him twice, thrice. After which they
vanished, she in one direction, and the invader and marauder in another.

If either of these two had seen the face of the man with a pencil
and paper under the spreading beechtree, they would not have been so
impatient for tomorrow, and Carmen would not have said "for sure."

Jean Jacques was awake at last, man as well as philosopher.

CHAPTER VIII. THE GATE IN THE WALL. Jean Jacques was not without
originality of a kind, and not without initiative; but there were also
the elements of the very old Adam in him, and the strain of the obvious.
If he had been a real genius, rather than a mere lively variation of the
commonplace--a chicken that could never burst its shell, a bird which
could not quite break into song--he might have made his biographer guess
hard and futilely, as to what he would do after having seen his wife's
arms around the neck of another man than himself--a man little more
than a manual labourer, while he, Jean Jacques Barbille, had come of the
people of the Old Regime. As it was, this magnate of St. Saviour's,
who yesterday posed so sympathetically and effectively in the Court at
Vilray as a figure of note, did the quite obvious thing: he determined
to kill the master-carpenter from Laplatte.

There was no genius in that. When, from under the spreading beech-tree,
Jean Jacques saw his wife footing it back to her house with a light,
wayward step; when he watched the master-carpenter vault over a stone
fence five feet high with a smile of triumph mingled with doubt on his
face, he was too stunned at first to move or speak. If a sledge-hammer
strikes you on the skull, though your skull is of such a hardness that
it does not break, still the shock numbs activity for awhile, at any
rate. The sledge-hammer had descended on Jean Jacques' head, and also
had struck him between the eyes; and it is in the credit balance o