-smile was on his lips.

"It's in the play," he said.

"No, it's not in the charade, Monsieur Barbille," said the Man from
Outside fretfully.

"That is the way I read it, m'sieu'," retorted Jean Jacques, and he made
a motion to the fiddler.

"The dance! The dance!" he exclaimed.

But yet he looked little like a man who wished to dance, save upon a
grave.

CHAPTER XIV. "I DO NOT WANT TO GO"

It is a bad thing to call down a crisis in the night-time. A "scene" at
midnight is a savage enemy of ultimate understanding, and that Devil,
called Estrangement, laughs as he observes the objects of his attention
in conflict when the midnight candle burns.

He should have been seized with a fit of remorse, however, at the sight
he saw in the Manor Cartier at midnight of the day when Jean Jacques
Barbille had reached his fiftieth year. There is nothing which, for
pathos and for tragedy, can compare with a struggle between the young
and the old.

The Devil of Estrangement when he sees it, may go away and indulge
himself in sleep; for there will be no sleep for those who, one young
and the other old, break their hearts on each other's anvils, when the
lights are low and it is long till morning.

When Jean Jacques had broken the forgotten guitar which his daughter had
retrieved from her mother's life at the Manor Cartier (all else he had
had packed and stored away in the flour-mill out of sight) and thrown it
in the fire, there had begun a revolt in the girl's heart, founded on a
sense of injustice, but which itself became injustice also; and that is
a dark thing to come between those who love--even as parent and child.

After her first exclamation of dismay and pain, Zoe had regained her
composure, and during the rest of the evening she was full of feverish
gaiety. Indeed her spirits and playful hospitality made the evening a
success in spite of the skeleton at the feast. Jean Jacques had also
roused himself, and, when the dance began, he joined in with spirit,
though his face was worn and haggard even when lighted by his smile. But
though the evening came to the conventional height of hilarity, there
was a note running through it which made even the youngest look at each
other, as though to say, "Now, what's going to happen next!"

Three people at any rate knew that something was going to happen. They
were Zoe, the Man from Outside and M. Fille. Zoe had had more than one
revelation that night, and she felt again a