rising straight up in the windless air; over all peace and a perfect
silence.

Charley mechanically fixed his eye-glass and stood with hands resting on
the window-sill, looking, looking out upon a new world.

At length he turned.

"Is there anything I can do for you, M'sieu'?" said Jo huskily.

Charley held out his hand and clasped Jo's. "Tell me about all these
months," he said.




CHAPTER XII

THE COMING OF ROSALIE

Charley Steele saw himself as he had been through the eyes of another.
He saw the work that he had done in the carpentering shed, and had no
memory of it. The real Charley Steele had been enveloped in oblivion for
seven months. During that time a mild phantom of himself had wandered,
as it were in a somnambulistic dream, through the purlieus of life.
Open-eyed, but with the soul asleep, all idiosyncrasy laid aside, all
acquired impressions and influences vanished, he had been walking in the
world with no more complexity of mind than a new-born child, nothing
intervening between the sight of the eyes and the original sense.