The morrow—that is always, by some alchemistic process, to convert the drossy problems of the night into liquid gold—greeted Ned with leaden untransmutable skies, that were only too representative of the irresolvable heaviness of his own thoughts. He looked out of his grimy window of the little tavern on which he had quartered himself, and saw the yellow of an almost substantial atmosphere sandwiched between a sagged grey welkin and a world of livid snow; and he saw no prospect, in that before him, of any illumination of his dull perplexity.
He dressed, breakfasted, and presently went out into the streets. The desire to postpone that hour of inevitable struggle with an allurement which, he dreaded, in his present condition of emotional bewilderment, he would be unable to resist, drove him to take a rambling course to his lodgings.
He had gone down to the Quay of the Thuilleries, and was turning into the gardens, when his attention was drawn to a man who rose from a bench at the moment, and greeted him with a timid ejaculation of delight.
He stopped, somewhat impatiently—started, stared, and uttered an exclamation in his turn. For, in the ragged, large-boned stranger, who was looking at him from eyes that held the very spirit of patient deprecation, he recognised all at once the poor pariah of a long-past experience—the Cagot whom he had befriended in the woods of Méricourt.
He held out his hand in a sudden rush of emotion. The man advanced, bent down, and touched it reverently.
“Monsieur!” murmured the poor creature, “it is the sunshine breaking.”
Ned regarded him with infinite humble pity. The thought of the charity so large; of the humanity so rare and so remote from that proclaimed in the windy casuistries of liberators, who would use its name rather as a war-cry than as a message of peace; the thought of how this outcast, reflecting in his selfless chivalry the very altruism of the Man of Sorrow, had recently helped and protected a member of the race that had made him so, was like a cool breath on his troubled brain.
“I think it is—I hope it is,” he said gently.
He put his hand on the shoulder of the gaunt figure. The man was buttoned against the bitter cold into the mere scarecrow of a jacket. His feet were bare and scarred with blood; his cheeks, his flesh wherever seen—and that was in more places than custom prescribes—were fallen in upon a frame accordant with the strong soul that inhabited there.
“And so,” said Ned, “you are alone at last in the world.”