"Always—until you come—and after!"
Gaston bent again, but this time he only pressed his lips to the soft, pale hair.
When the door closed behind her; he stood for a moment dazed and bewildered. Mechanically he turned to the first task that lay at hand. He rebuilt the dead fire. It seemed symbolic, somehow, and he smiled. Then holding to the fancy that touched him, he piled on log after log.
There should be no lack of warmth and glow in the new reincarnation.
An hour later he left the house, with the needful things for his possible, long absence packed in a grip and flung across his shoulder.
He had attended to so many small comforts for Joyce—the fire, the writing out of directions, where to find money, etc.—that he had been hurried in the details of his own affairs; he had forgotten to take the key from the lock of the chest!
CHAPTER XIII
Jock Filmer was coming to the belief that there was a Destiny shaping his ends roughly, smooth-hew them as he had ever tried to do. Jock was pursued, there was no doubt of that. For reasons of his own he had drifted into St. Angé when very young. Most conveniently and soothingly memory and old habits dropped from him—they had clung tenaciously to Gaston. Jock adapted himself to circumstances and new environment with flattering promptness.