“That she is my friend,” corrected Jean Jacques. “And what a friend—merci, what a friend!” Suddenly he caught the woman’s arm. “You once wrote to your sister about my Zoe, my daughter, that married and ran away—”
“That ran away and got married,” she interrupted.
“Is there any more news—tell me, do you know-?”
But Virginie’s sister shook her head. “Only once since I wrote Virginie have I heard, and then the two poor children—but how helpless they were, clinging to each other so! Well, then, once I heard from Faragay, but that was much more than a year ago. Nothing since, and they were going on—on to Fort Providence to spend the winter—for his health—his lungs.”
“What to do—on what to live?” moaned Jean Jacques.
“His grandmother sent him a thousand dollars, so your Madame Zoe wrote me.”
Jean Jacques raised a hand with a gesture of emotion. “Ah, the blessed woman! May there be no purgatory for her, but Heaven at once and always!”
“Come home with me—where are your things?” she asked.
“I have only a knapsack,” he replied. “It is not far from here. But I cannot stay with you. I have no claim. No, I will not, for—”
“As to that, we keep a tavern,” she returned. “You can come the same as the rest of the world. The company is mixed, but there it is. You needn’t eat off the same plate, as they say in Quebec.”