“You are going?” Norah whispered, and in her eyes was a great relief and the light of victory. The golden link binding Nolan and herself was in her arms, over her heart.
Jean Jacques did not speak a word in reply, though his lips moved. She held out the little one to him for a good-bye, but he shook his head. If he did that—if he once held her in his arms—he would not be able to give her up. Gravely and solemnly, however, he stooped over and kissed the lips of the child lying against Norah’s breast. As he did so, with a quick, mothering instinct Norah impulsively kissed his shaggy head, and her eyes filled with tears. She smiled too, and Jean Jacques saw how beautiful her teeth were—cruel no longer.
He moved away slowly. At the door he turned, and looked back at the two—a long, lingering look he gave. Then he faced away from them again.
“Moi je suis philosophe,” he said gently, and opened the door and stepped out and away into the frozen world.
EPILOGUE.
Change might lay its hand on the parish of St. Saviour’s, and it did so on the beautiful sentient living thing, as on the thing material and man-made; but there was no change in the sheltering friendship of Mont Violet or the flow of the illustrious Beau Cheval. The autumns also changed not at all. They cast their pensive canopies over the home-scene which Jean Jacques loved so well, before he was exhaled from its bosom.
One autumn when the hillsides were in those colours which none but a rainbow of the moon ever had, so delicately sad, so tenderly assuring, a traveller came back to St. Saviour’s after a long journey. He came by boat to the landing at the Manor Cartier, rather than by train to the railway-station, from which there was a drive of several miles to Vilray. At the landing he was met by a woman, as much a miniature of the days of Orleanist France as himself. She wore lace mits which covered the hands but not the fingers, and her gown showed the outline of a meek crinoline.
“Ah, Fille—ah, dear Fille!” said the little fragment of an antique day, as the Clerk of the Court—rather, he that had been for so many years Clerk of the Court—stepped from the boat. “I can scarce believe that you are here once more. Have you good news?”
“It was to come back with good news that I went,” her brother answered smiling, his face lighted by an inner exaltation.