e day when she must go from the garish scene,
she unconsciously took stock of life in her own way. There intruded on
her sight the stages of the theatres where she had played and danced,
and she heard again the music of the paloma and those other Spanish airs
which had made the world dance under her girl's feet long ago. At
first she kept seeing the faces of thousands looking up at her from the
stalls, down at her from the gallery, over at her from the boxes; and
the hot breath of that excitement smote her face with a drunken odour
that sent her mad. Then, alas! somehow, as disease took hold of her,
there were the colder lights, the colder breath from the few who
applauded so little. And always the man who had left her in her day of
direst need; who had had the last warm fires of her life, the last brief
outrush of her soul, eager as it was for a joy which would prove she
had not lost all when she fled from the Manor Cartier--a joy which would
make her forget!

What she really did feel in this last adventure of passion only made her
remember the more when she was alone now, her life at the Manor
Cartier. She was wont to wake up suddenly in the morning--the very early
morning--with the imagined sound of the gold Cock of Beaugard crowing in
her ears. Memory, memory, memory--yet never a word, and never a hearsay
of what had happened at the Manor Cartier since she had left it! Then
there came a time when she longed intensely to see Jean Jacques before
she died, though she could not bring herself to send word to him. She
dreaded what the answer might be--not Jean Jacques' answer, but the
answer of Life. Jean Jacques and her child, her Zoe--more his than hers
in years gone by--one or both might be dead! She dared not write, but
she cherished a desire long denied. Then one day she saw everything in
her life more clearly than she had ever done. She found an old book of
French verse, once belonging to Mme. Popincourt's husband, who had been
a professor. Some lines therein opened up a chamber of her being never
before unlocked. At first only the feeling of the thing came, then
slowly the spiritual meaning possessed her. She learnt it by heart and
let it sing to her as she lay half-sleeping and half-waking, half-living
and half-dying:

"There is a World; men compass it through tears,
Dare doom for joy of it; it called me o'er the foam;
I found it down the track of sundering years,
Beyond the long island where