the colder lights, the colder breath from the few who applauded so
little. And always the man who had left her in her day of direst need;
who had had the last warm fires of her life, the last brief outrush of
her soul, eager as it was for a joy which would prove she had not lost
all when she fled from the Manor Cartier--a joy which would make her
forget!

What she really did feel in this last adventure of passion only made her
remember the more when she was alone now, her life at the Manor Cartier.
She was wont to wake up suddenly in the morning--the very early morning
--with the imagined sound of the gold Cock of Beaugard crowing in her
ears. Memory, memory, memory--yet never a word, and never a hearsay of
what had happened at the Manor Cartier since she had left it! Then there
came a time when she longed intensely to see Jean Jacques before she
died, though she could not bring herself to send word to him. She
dreaded what the answer might be-not Jean Jacques' answer, but the answer
of Life. Jean Jacques and her child, her Zoe--more his than hers in
years gone by--one or both might be dead! She dared not write, but she
cherished a desire long denied. Then one day she saw everything in her
life more clearly than she had ever done. She found an old book of
French verse, once belonging to Mme. Popincourt's husband, who had been a
professor. Some lines therein opened up a chamber of her being never
before unlocked. At first only the feeling of the thing came, then
slowly the spiritual meaning possessed her. She learnt it by heart and
let it sing to her as she lay half-sleeping and half-waking, half-living
and half-dying:

"There is a World; men compass it through tears,
Dare doom for joy of it; it called me o'er the foam;
I found it down the track of sundering years,