He made an involuntary motion of his hand to his breast, where old Louis
Trudel had set a sign. So long as he lived, it must be there to read:
a shining smooth scar of excoriation, a sacred sign of the faith he had
never been able to accept; of which he had never, indeed, been able to
think, so distant had been his soul, until, against his will, his heart
had answered to the revealing call in a woman's eyes. He felt her
fingers touch his breast as they did that night the iron seared him; and
out of this first intimacy of his soul he wrote:

"What is the token?
Bruised and broken,
Bend I my life to a blossoming rod?
Shall then the worst things
Come to the first things,
Finding the best of all, last of all, God?"

Like the cry of his "Aphrodite," written that last afternoon of the old
life, this plaint ended with the same restless, unceasing question. But
there was a difference. There was no longer the material, distant note
of a pagan mind; there was the intimate, spiritual note of a mind finding
a foothold on the submerged causeway of life and time.

As he folded up the paper to put it into his pocket, Jo Portugais entered
the room. He threw in a corner the wet bag which had protected his
shoulders from the rain, hung his hat on a peg of the chimney-piece,
nodded to Charley, and put a kettle on the little fire.

"A big storm, M'sieu'," Jo said presently as he put some tea into a pot.