and the right side of seventy as well! The evidence you have given of a
close knowledge of the household of our Jean Jacques does not have its
basis in hearsay, but in acute personal observation. Tut-tut! Fie-fie!
my little gay Clerk of the Court. Fie! Fie!"

M. Fille was greatly disconcerted. He had never been a Lothario.
In forty years he had never had an episode with one of "the other sex,"
but it was not because he was impervious to the softer emotions. An
intolerable shyness had ever possessed him when in the presence of women,
and even small girl children had frightened him, till he had made friends
with little Zoe Barbille, the daughter of Jean Jacques. Yet even with
Zoe, who was so simple and companionable and the very soul of childish
confidence, he used to blush and falter till she made him talk. Then he
became composed, and his tongue was like a running stream, and on that
stream any craft could sail. On it he became at ease with madame the
Spanische, and he even went so far as to look her full in the eyes on
more than one occasion.

"Answer me--ah, you cannot answer!" teasingly added the Judge, who loved
his Clerk of the Court, and had great amusement out of his discomfiture.
"You are convicted. At an age when a man should be settling down, you
are gallivanting with the wife of a philosopher."

"Monsieur--monsieur le juge!" protested M. Fille with slowly heightening
colour. "I am innocent, yes, altogether. There is nothing, believe me.
It is the child, the little Zoe--but a maid of charm and kindness. She
brings me cakes and the toffy made by her own hands; and if I go to the
Manor Cartier, as I often do, it is to be polite and neighbourly. If
Madame says things to me, and if I see what I see, and hear what I hear,
it is no crime; it is no misdemeanour; it is within the law--the perfect