ng to the red wagon--Madame Jean Jacques.
Is she not a figure of a woman? See the walk of her--is it not
distinguished? She is half a hand-breadth taller than Jean Jacques. And
her face, most sure it is a face to see. If Jean Jacques was not so busy
with his farms and his mills and his kilns and his usury, he would see
what a woman he has got. It is his good fortune that she has such
sense in business. When Jean Jacques listens to her, he goes right.
She herself did not want her father to manage the lime-kilns--the old
Sebastian Dolores. She was for him staying at Mirimachi, where he kept
the books of the lumber firm. But no, Jean Jacques said that he could
make her happy by having her father near her, and he would not believe
she meant what she said. He does not understand her; that is the
trouble. He knows as much of women or men as I know of--"

"Of the law--hein?" laughed the great man.

"Monsieur--ah, that is your little joke! I laugh, yes, but I laugh,"
responded the Clerk of the Court a little uncertainly. "Now once when
she told him that the lime-kilns--"

The Judge, who had retraced his steps down the street of the town--it
was little more than a large village, but because it had a court-house
and a marketplace it was called a town--that he might have a good look
at Madame Jean Jacques and her child before he passed them, suddenly
said:

"How is it you know so much about it all, Maitre Fille--as to what
she says and of the inner secrets of the household? Ah, ha, my little
Lothario, I have caught you--a bachelor too, with time on his hands,
and the right side of seventy as well! The evidence you have given of a
close knowledge of the household of our Jean Jacques does not have its
basis in hearsay, but in acute personal observation. Tut-tut! Fie-fie!
my little gay Clerk of the Court. Fie! Fie!"

M. Fille was greatly disconcerted. He had never been a Lothario. In
forty years he had never had an episode with one of "the other sex,"
but it was not because he was impervious to the softer emotions. An
intolerable shyness had ever possessed him when in the presence of
women, and even small girl children had frightened him, till he had made
friends with little Zoe Barbille, the daughter of Jean Jacques. Yet
even with Zoe, who was so simple and companionable and the very soul of
childish confidence, he used to blush and falter till she made him talk.
Then he became composed, and his tongue was like a running stream