p looking at him and saying, "There's the man that
never flinched when things went wrong; there's the man that was a friend
to everyone."

At last a thought came to him--the key to the situation as it seemed,
the one thing necessary to meet the financial situation. He would sell
the biggest farm he owned, which had been to him in its importance like
the flour-mill itself. He had had an offer for it that very day, and
a bigger offer still a week before. It was mortgaged to within eight
thousand dollars of what it could be sold for but, if he could gain
time, that eight thousand dollars would build the mill again. M. Mornay,
the Big Financier, would certainly see that this was his due--to get
his chance to pull things straight. Yes, he would certainly sell the
Barbille farm to-morrow. With this thought in his mind he went to sleep
at last, and he did not wake till the sun was high.

It was a sun of the most wonderful brightness and warmth. Yesterday it
would have made the Manor Cartier and all around it look like Arcady.
But as it shone upon the ruins of the mill, when Jean Jacques went out
into the working world again, it made so gaunt and hideous a picture
that, in spite of himself, a cry of misery came from his lips.

Through all the misfortunes which had come to him the outward semblance
of things had remained, and when he went in and out of the plantation
of the Manor Cartier, there was no physical change in the surroundings,
which betrayed the troubles and disasters fallen upon its overlord.
There it all was just as it had ever been, and seeming to deny that
anything had changed in the lives of those who made the place other
than a dead or deserted world. When Carmen went, when Zoe fled, when his
cousin Auguste Charron took his flight, when defeats at law abashed
him, the house and mills, and stores and offices, and goodly trees, and
well-kept yards and barns and cattle-sheds all looked the same. Thus
it was that he had been fortified. In one sense his miseries had seemed
unreal, because all was the same in the outward scene. It was as though
it all said to him: "It is a dream that those you love have vanished,
that ill-fortune sits by your fireside. One night you will go to bed
thinking that wife and child have gone, that your treasury is nearly
empty; and in the morning you will wake up and find your loved ones
sitting in their accustomed places, and your treasury will be full to
overflowing as of old."

So it