An hour later, when Justin had his key in the lock of the outer door, she came back. Her face was calm now, and she spoke politely. "Give me that token, or whatever it is. No, I will not go in your office. Go get it, I will wait here," and she stepped inside the door.
Justin looking over his shoulder, to keep a watchful eye on the entrance door, hastened to his room, unlocked his safe, withdrew a small parcel and came back.
Miss Gastonguay tore off the folds of tissue-paper. There was nothing but a little shoe inside,— a little shoe of white velvet ornamented with gilt buttons.
"Our mother was a proud woman," she said, calmly, as she surveyed it. "Louis and I were shod in velvet, while our playmates had to be content with leather. We always played together," she went on, holding up the shoe, and speaking in a voice of unnatural calm. "He was a handsome little lad. Though I was much older, he used to put his arm around my neck and call me his little Jane."
Justin silently pointed to the tiny sole. On it was written in a faltering hand, "Little Jane's shoe,—carried over half the world by her unworthy Louis."
"Oh, my God," she said, suddenly. "I loved him so!" and staggering against the wall she burst into violent and painful weeping. "My poor lost brother—and I would have died for him— Go away, young man, don't look at me in my misery."
Justin's own eyes were full of tears. In distressed sympathy he went for a glass of water that she would not drink. "Go away, go away," she said, waving her hands at him, so that at last he was obliged to take his station on the street where the white pony stood gazing at him in reproachful anxiety.
In a quarter of an hour Miss Gastonguay came out. Her face was more stern than usual, but bore no traces of tears, and without a word to him, and looking neither to the right nor to the left, she took the road to French Cross, followed by the pony with sympathetically drooping head.