After meeting him she awoke to the fact that there was a difference between men, that it was not the same thing to be young as to be old; that the reason why she could kiss the old Judge and the little Clerk of the Court, and not kiss, say, the young manager of the great lumber firm who came every year for a fortnight’s fishing at St. Saviour’s, was one which had an understandable cause and was not a mere matter of individual taste. She had been good friends with this young manager, who was only thirty years of age, and was married, but when he had wanted to kiss her on saying good-bye one recent summer, she had said, “Oh, no, oh, no, that would spoil it all!” Yet when he had asked her why, and what she meant, she could not tell him. She did not know; but by the end of the first week after Gerard Fynes had been brought to the Manor Cartier by Louis Charron, she knew.
She had then been suddenly awakened from mere girlhood. Judge Carcasson saw the difference in her on a half-hour’s visit as he passed westward, and he had said to M. Fille, “Who is the man, my keeper of the treasure?” The reply had been of such a sort that the Judge was startled:
“Tut, tut,” he had exclaimed, “an actor—an actor once a lawyer! That’s serious. She’s at an age—and with a temperament like hers she’ll believe anything, if once her affections are roused. She has a flair for the romantic, for the thing that’s out of reach—the bird on the highest branch, the bird in the sky beyond ours, the song that was lost before time was, the light that never was on sea or land. Why, damn it, damn it all, my Solon, here’s the beginning of a case in Court unless we can lay the fellow by the heels! How long is he here for?”
When M. Fille had told him that he would stay for another month for certain, and no doubt much longer, if there seemed a prospect of winning the heiress of the Manor Cartier, the Judge gave a groan.
“We must get him away, somehow,” he said. “Where does he stay?”
“At the house of Louis Charron,” was the reply. “Louis Charron—isn’t he the fellow that sells whisky without a license?”
“It is so, monsieur.”
The Judge moved his head from side to side like a bear in a cage. “It is that, is it, my Fille? By the thumb of the devil, isn’t it time then that Louis Charron was arrested for breaking the law? Also how do we know but that the interloping fellow Fynes is an agent for a whisky firm perhaps? Couldn’t he, then, on suspicion, be arrested with—”
The Clerk of the Court shook his head mournfully. His Judge was surely becoming childish in his old age. He looked again closely at the great man, and saw a glimmer of moisture in the grey eyes. It was clear that Judge Carcasson felt deeply the dangers of the crisis, and that the futile outburst had merely been the agitated protest of the helpless.
“The man is what he says he is—an actor; and it would be folly to arrest him. If our Zoe is really fond of him, it would only make a martyr of him.”