“Oh, no; I knew he would make friends with me—the hound.”
“Of course,” he rejoined.
“We should show animals that we trust them,” she said, in some confusion, for being near him made her heart throb painfully.
He did not answer. Presently his eye glanced at the paper again, and was arrested. He ran his fingers over it, and a curious look flashed across his face. He held the paper up to the light quickly, and looked through it. It was thin, half-foreign paper, without lines, and there was a water-mark in it-large, shadowy, filmy—Kathleen.
It was paper made in the mills which had belonged to Kathleen’s uncle. This water-mark was made to celebrate their marriage-day. Only for one year had this paper been made, and then the trade in it was stopped. It had gone its ways down the channels of commerce, and here it was in his hand, a reminder, not only of the old life, but, as it were, the parchment for the new. There it was, a piece of plain good paper, ready for pen and ink and his letter to the Cure’s brother in Paris—the only letter he would ever write, ever again until he died, so he told himself; but hold it up to the light and there was the name over which his letter must be written—Kathleen, invisible but permanent, obscured, but brought to life by the raising of a hand.
The girl caught the flash of feeling in his face, saw him holding the paper up to the light, and then, with an abstracted air, calmly lay it down.
“That will do, thank you,” he said. “Give me the whole packet.” She wrapped it up for him without a word, and he laid down a two-dollar note, the last he had in the world.
“How much of this paper have you?” he asked. The girl looked under the counter. “Six packets,” she said. “Six, and a few sheets over.”
“I will take it all. But keep it for me, for a week, or perhaps a fortnight, will you?” He did not need all this paper to write letters upon, yet he meant to buy all the paper of this sort that the shop contained. But he must get money from Louis Trudel—he would speak about it to-morrow.
“Monsieur does not want me to sell even the loose sheets?”