n the
Appeal Court, monsieur; also, his cousin, Auguste Charron, who has been
working the Latouche farm, has flitted, leaving--"

"Leaving Jean Jacques to pay unexpected debts?"

"So, monsieur."

"Then I can be of no use, I fear," remarked M. Mornay dryly.

"Fille! Fille!" came the voice of Jean Jacques insistently from the
room.

"And so I will say au revoir, Monsieur Fille," continued the Big
Financier.

A moment later the great man was gone, and M. Fille was alone with the
philosopher of the Manor Cartier.

"Well, well, why do you keep me waiting! Who was it in there--anyone
that's concerned with my affairs?" asked Jean Jacques.

In these days he was sensitive when there was no cause, and he was
credulous where he ought to be suspicious. The fact that the little man
had held the door against him made him sure that M. Fille had not wished
him to see the departed visitor.

"Come, out with it--who was it making fresh trouble for me?" persisted
Jean Jacques.

"No one making trouble for you, my friend," answered the Clerk of the
Court, "but someone who was trying to do you a good turn."

"He must have been a stranger then," returned Jean Jacques bitterly.
"Who was it?"

M. Fille, after an instant's further hesitation, told him.

"Oh, him--M. Momay!" exclaimed Jean Jacques, with a look of relief, his
face lighting. "That's a big man with a most capable and far-reaching
mind. He takes a thing in as the ocean mouths a river. If I had had
men like that to deal with all my life, what a different ledger I'd be
balancing now! Descartes, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel--he
has an ear for them all. That is the intellectual side of him; and in
business"--he threw up a hand--"there he views the landscape from the
mountain-top. He has vision, strategy, executive. He is Napoleon
and Anacreon in one. He is of the builders on the one hand, of the
Illuminati and the Encyclopedistes on the other."

Even the Clerk of the Court, with his circumscribed range of thought and
experience, in that moment saw Jean Jacques as he really was. Here was
a man whose house of life was beginning to sway from an earthquake;
who had been smitten in several deadly ways, and was about to receive
buffetings beyond aught he had yet experienced, philosophizing on the
tight-rope--Blondin and Plato in one. Yet sardonically piteous as it
was, the incident had shown Jean Jacques with the germ of something big
in him. He had recognized in M.