"Ah, there!" he said savagely. "There—there!" When he turned round slowly again, his face—which he had never sought to control before he had his great Accident seven years ago—was under his command. A strange, ironic-almost sardonic-smile was on his lips.
"It's in the play," he said.
"No, it's not in the charade, Monsieur Barbille," said the Man from
Outside fretfully.
"That is the way I read it, m'sieu'," retorted Jean Jacques, and he made a motion to the fiddler.
"The dance! The dance!" he exclaimed.
But yet he looked little like a man who wished to dance, save upon a grave.
CHAPTER XIV
"I DO NOT WANT TO GO"
It is a bad thing to call down a crisis in the night-time. A "scene" at midnight is a savage enemy of ultimate understanding, and that Devil, called Estrangement, laughs as he observes the objects of his attention in conflict when the midnight candle burns.
He should have been seized with a fit of remorse, however, at the sight he saw in the Manor Cartier at midnight of the day when Jean Jacques Barbille had reached his fiftieth year. There is nothing which, for pathos and for tragedy, can compare with a struggle between the young and the old.