sh! Be still, my friend--as good a
friend as a man could have. If my Zoe came back I'd like to feel--I'd
like to feel that I had saved things alone; that no woman's money made
me safe. If Zoe or if--"

He was going to say, "If Carmen came back," for his mind was moving in
past scenes; but he stopped short and looked around helplessly. Then
presently, as though by an effort, he added with a bravura note in his
voice:

"The world has been full of trouble for a long time, but there have
always been men to say to trouble, 'I am master, I have the mind to get
above it all.' Well, I am one of them."

There was no note of vanity or bombast in his voice as he said this,
and in his eyes that new underglow deepened and shone. Perhaps in this
instant he saw more of his future than he would speak of to anyone on
earth. Perhaps prevision was given him, and it was as the Big Financier
had said to Maitre Fille, that his philosophy was now, at the last, to
be of use to him. When his wife had betrayed him, and his wife and child
had left him, he had said, "Moi je suis philosophe!" but he was a man
of wealth in those days, and money soothes hurts of that kind in rare
degree. Would he still say, whatever was yet to come, that he was a
philosopher?

"Well, I've done what I thought would help you, and I can't say more
than that," Virginie remarked with a sigh, and there was despondency
in her eyes. Her face became flushed, her bosom showed agitation; she
looked at him as she had done in Maitre Fille's office, and a wave
of feeling passed over him now, as it did then, and he remembered, in
response to her look, the thrill of his fingers in her palm. His face
now flushed also, and he had an impulse to ask her to sit down beside
him. He put it away from him, however, for the present, at any rate-who
could tell what to-morrow might bring forth!--and then he held out his
hand to her. His voice shook a little when he spoke; but it cleared, and
began to ring, before he had said a dozen words.

"I'll never forget what you've said and done this morning, Virginie
Poucette," he declared; "and if I break the back of the trouble that's
in my way, and come out cock o' the walk again"--the gold Cock of
Beaugard in the ruins near and the clarion of the bantam of his barnyard
were in his mind and ears--"it'll be partly because of you. I hug that
thought to me."

"I could do a good deal more than that," she ventured, with a tremulous
voice, and then