ong, exultant,
home-like, intimate.

Jean Jacques walked on, the bird singing by his side; and he did not
look back.

CHAPTER XXI. IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME

Nothing stops when we stop for a time, or for all time, except
ourselves. Everything else goes on--not in the same way; but it does go
on. Life did not stop at St. Saviour's after Jean Jacques made his exit.
Slowly the ruined mill rose up again, and very slowly indeed the widow
of Palass Poucette recovered her spirits, though she remained a widow
in spite of all appeals; but M. Fille and his sister never were the same
after they lost their friend. They had great comfort in the dog
which Jean Jacques had given to them, and they roused themselves to a
malicious pleasure when Bobon, as he had been called by Zoe, rushed out
at the heels of an importunate local creditor who had greatly worried
Jean Jacques at the last. They waited in vain for a letter from Jean
Jacques, but none came; nor did they hear anything from him, or of him,
for a long, long time.

Jean Jacques did not mean that they should. When he went away with his
book of philosophy and his canary he had but one thing in his mind, and
that was to find Zoe and make her understand that he knew he had been
in the wrong. He had illusions about starting life again, in which he
probably did not believe; but the make-believe was good for him. Long
before the crash came, in Zoe's name--not his own--he had bought from
the Government three hundred and twenty acres of land out near the
Rockies and had spent five hundred dollars in improvements on it.

There it was in the West, one remaining asset still his own--or rather
Zoe's--but worth little if he or she did not develop it. As he left St.
Saviour's, however, he kept fixing his mind on that "last domain," as he
called it to himself. If this was done intentionally, that he might be
saved from distraction and despair, it was well done; if it was a real
illusion--the old self-deception which had been his bane so often in the
past--it still could only do him good at the present. It prevented him
from noticing the attention he attracted on the railway journey from St.
Saviour's to Montreal, cherishing his canary and his book as he went.

He was not so self-conscious now as in the days when he was surprised
that Paris did not stop to say, "Bless us, here is that fine fellow,
Jean Jacques Barbille of St. Saviour's!" He could concentrate himself
more now on things