This fame and power will mean
more to you than anything else, and it will grow and grow and grow,
Jean. And, oh, Jean, I am afraid you will forget that it is not you at
all who does these great things but that it is the _bon Dieu_ who lets
you do them, and that you will grow proud, Jean, and lose all the best
out of your life because you will even forget that once those clothes
hanging there"--she pointed toward the rough fisherman's suit--"were
yours."

It was strange to hear Marie-Louise talking so! He did not entirely
understand. Something was bewildering him. She was telling him that
he must think no more of her, that it was finished. And there was no
scene. And she did not reproach him. And there were no tears. And it
did not seem as though it were quite real. He had pictured quite
another kind of scene, where there would be passion and angry words.
And there was nothing of that--only Marie-Louise, like a grown-up
Marie-Louise, like a mother almost, speaking so gravely and anxiously
to him of things one would not expect Marie-Louise to know anything
about.

She turned from him impulsively; and from the peg took down the cap and
the rough suit, and from the floor gathered up the heavy boots with the
coarse socks tucked into their tops--and, as he watched her in
amazement, she thrust them suddenly into his arms.

"Promise me, Jean," she said in the same low way, "that you will keep
these with you always, and that sometimes in your great world you will
look at them and remember--that they, too, belong to France"--and then
suddenly her voice broke, and she had run from the room.

She was gone. Jean's eyes, from the doorway, shifted to the clothes
that cluttered up his arms--and for a long time he did not move. Then
one hand lifted slowly, and in a dazed sort of way brushed the hair
back from his eyes. It was a strange thing, that--to take these things
with him to remember--what was it she had said?--to remember that they,
too, belonged to France.

"_Mon Dieu_!" he whispered--and, with a queer lift of his shoulders,
turned mechanically to the trunk beside him. "_Mon Dieu_!" he
whispered again--and now there was a twisted little smile of pain upon
his lips as understanding came, and almost reverently he laid the
things in the bottom of the trunk.

-- XI --

THE PENDULUM

How many miles had they come? Jean did not know. It had been far--but
far along a road of golden dreams, where time an