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This drew the attention of M. Fille, who raised his head reprovingly he could not get rid of the feeling that he was in court, and that a case was being tried; and the severity of a Judge is naught compared with the severity of a Clerk of the Court, particularly if he is small and unmarried, and has no one to beat him into manageable humanity. M. Fille's voice was almost querulous.
Judge Carcasson had always said that Zoe had judgment beyond her years; M. Fille had remarked often that she had both prudence and shrewdness as well as a sympathetic spirit; but M. Fille's little whispering sister, who could never be tempted away from her home to any house, to whom the market and the church were like pilgrimages to distant wilds, had said to her brother: "Wait, Armand wait till Zoe is waked, and then prudence and wisdom will be but accident.
Jean Jacques' admiration of the lion who could, and would, slay him was the best tribute to his own character. M. Fille's eyes moistened as he realized it; and he knew that nothing he could say or do would make this man accommodate his actions to the hard rules of the business of life; he must for ever be applying to them conceptions of a half-developed mind.
Ever since Zoe's mother had vanished alone seven years before from the Manor Cartier, or rather from his office at Vilray, M. Fille had been as much like a maiden aunt or a very elder brother to the Spanische's daughter as a man could be. Of M. Fille's influence over his daughter and her love of his companionship, Jean Jacques had no jealousy whatever.
"Better hurry, Mere Langlois, or everybody won't hear your story before sundown. If your throat gets tired, there's Brown's Bronchial Troches " She pointed to an advertisement on the fence near by. "M. Fille's cook says they cure a rasping throat." With that shot, Virginie Poucette whipped up her horses and drove on.
"Monsieur oh, monsieur, do not shut the door in the face of God like that!" said the shocked little master of the law. "Those two together it may be only for a moment." "Ah, no, my little owl, Jean Jacques will wind the boa-constrictor round his neck like a collar, all for love of those he has lost," answered the Judge with emotion; and he caught M. Fille's arm in the companionship of sorrow.
The familiarity of but never mind what it is that so often forces husband and wife apart. It is there, and it breaks out in rebellion as it did with the wife of Jean Jacques Barbille. As she was a strong woman in her way, it spoiled her life, and his too when it broke out." M. Fille's face lighted with memory and feeling. "Ah, a woman of powerful emotions, monsieur, that is so!
Her face became flushed, her bosom showed agitation; she looked at him as she had done in Maitre Fille's office, and a wave of feeling passed over him now, as it did then, and he remembered, in response to her look, the thrill of his fingers in her palm. His face now flushed also, and he had an impulse to ask her to sit down beside him.
"What did I say, monsieur?" asked the Big Financier. "The mind that's received a blow must be moving moving; the man with the many irons must be flying from bellows to bellows!" "Come, come, there's no time to lose," came Jean Jacques' voice again, and the handle of the door of their room turned. M. Fille's hand caught the handle.
The very day Mademoiselle Zoe left the Manor Cartier to marry the English actor, Jean Jacques took that Spanish bad-lot to his home; and there he stays, and the old friends go the old friends go; and he does not seem to miss them." There was something like a sob in M. Fille's voice.
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