endous, despair makes it
small and even trivial.

It was when he had reached the little office where he had done the
business of his life--a kind of neutral place where he had ever isolated
himself from the domestic scene--that the final sensation, save one, of
his existence at the Manor came to him. Virginie Poucette had divined
his purpose when he began the tour of the house, and going by a
roundabout way, she had placed herself where she could speak with him
alone before he left the place for ever--if that was to be. She was not
sure that his exit was really inevitable--not yet.

When Jean Jacques saw Virginie standing beside the table in his office
where he lead worked over so many years, now marked Sold, and waiting to
be taken away by its new owner, he started and drew back, but she held
out her hand and said:

"But one word, M'sieu' Jean Jacques; only one word from a friend--indeed
a friend."

"A friend of friends," he answered, still in abstraction, his eyes
having that burnished light which belonged to the night of the fire; but
yet realizing that she was a sympathetic soul who had offered to lend
him money without security.

"Oh, indeed yes, as good a friend as you can ever have!" she added.

Something had waked the bigger part of her, which had never been awake
in the days of Palass Poucette. Jean Jacques was much older than she,
but what she felt had nothing to do with age, or place or station. It
had only to do with understanding, with the call of nature and of a
motherhood crying for expression. Her heart ached for him.

"Well, good-bye, my friend," he said, and held out his hand. "I must be
going now."

"Wait," she said, and there was something insistent and yet pleading in
her voice. "I've got something to say. You must hear it.... Why should
you go? There is my farm--it needs to be worked right. It has got
good chances. It has water-power and wood and the best flax in the
province--they want to start a flax-mill on it--I've had letters from
big men in Montreal. Well, why shouldn't you do it instead? There it is,
the farm, and there am I a woman alone. I need help. I've got no head.
I have to work at a sum of figures all night to get it straight.... Ah,
m'sieu', it is a need both sides! You want someone to look after you;
you want a chance again to do things; but you want someone to look
after you, and it is all waiting there on the farm. Palass Poucette
left behind him seven sound horses, and