"That does it," he said. "The horrible thing is gone again—out of my brain and out of my throat."
As he stood there, Jo came up the hill with a bundle in his arms.
Charley watched him for a moment, half whimsically, half curiously. Yet
he sighed once too as Portugais opened the door and came into the room.
"Well done, Jo!" said he. "You have 'em?"
"Yes, M'sieu'. A good suit, and I believe they'll fit. Old Trudel says it's the best suit he's made in a year. I'm afraid he'll not make many more suits, old Trudel.
"He's very bad. When he goes there'll be no tailor—ah, old Trudel will be missed for sure, M'sieu'!"
Jo spread the clothes out on the table—a coat, waistcoat, and trousers of fulled cloth, grey and bulky, and smelling of the loom and the tailor's iron. Charley looked at them interestedly, then glanced at the clothes he had on, the suit that had belonged to him last year—grave- clothes.
He drew himself up as though rousing from a dream. "Come, Jo, clear out, and you shall have your new habitant in a minute," he said. Portugais left the room, and when he came back, Charley was dressed in the suit of grey fulled cloth. It was loose, but comfortable, and save for the refined face—on which a beard was growing now—and the eye-glass, he might easily have passed for a farmer. When he put on the dog-skin fur cap and a small muffler round his neck, it was the costume of the habitant complete.
Yet it was no disguise, for it was part of the life that Charles Mallard, once Charley Steele, should lead henceforth.
He turned to the door and opened it. "Good-bye, Portugais," he said.
Jo was startled. "Where are you going, M'sieu'?"
"To the village."