es which missed nothing,
saw too; and his attention was strangely arrested by the faces of both
the mother and the child. His first glance at the woman's face made
him flash an inward light on the memory of Jean Jacques' face in the
witness-box, and a look of reflective irony came into his own. The face
of Carmen Dolores, wife of the philosophic miller and money-master, did
not belong to the world where she was placed--not because she was so
unlike the habitant women, or even the wives of the big farmers, or the
sister of the Cure, or the ladies of the military and commercial exiles
who lived in that portion of the province; but because of an alien
something in her look--a lonely, distant sense of isolation, a something
which might hide a companionship and sympathy of a rare kind, or might
be but the mask of a furtive, soulless nature. In the child's face was
nothing of this. It was open as the day, bright with the cheerfulness of
her father's countenance, alive with a humour which that countenance
did not possess. The contour was like that of Jean Jacques, but with a
fineness and delicacy to its fulness absent from his own; and her eyes
were a deep and lustrous brown, under a forehead which had a boldness
of gentle dignity possessed by neither father nor mother. Her hair
was thick, brown and very full, like that of her father, and in all
respects, save one, she had an advantage over both her parents. Her
mouth had a sweetness which might not unfairly be called weakness,
though that was balanced by a chin of commendable strength.

But the Judge's eyes found at once this vulnerable point in her
character as he had found that of her mother. Delightful the child was,
and alert and companionable, with no remarkable gifts, but with a rare
charm and sympathy. Her face was the mirror of her mind, and it had
no ulterior thought. Her mother's face, the Judge had noted, was the
foreground of a landscape which had lonely shadows. It was a face of
some distinction and suited to surroundings more notable, though the
rural life Carmen had led since the Antoine went down and her fortunes
came up, had coarsened her beauty a very little.

"There's something stirring in the coverts," said the Judge to himself
as he was introduced to the mother and child. By a hasty gesture Zoe
gave a command to M. Fille to help her down. With a hand on his shoulder
she dropped to the ground. Her object was at once apparent. She made a
pretty old-fashion