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“Come, little comrade, drink,” said Medallion, offering him a glass.

Parpon made no reply, but caught up the will, kissed it, put it into Armand’s hand, and then, jumping down from the table, ran to the door and disappeared through it.

IV.

The next afternoon the Avocat visited old Farette. Farette was polishing a gun, mumbling the while. Sitting on some bags of meal was Parpon, with a fierce twinkle in his eye. Monsieur Garon told Farette briefly what the Seigneur had left him. With a quick, greedy chuckle Farette threw the gun away.

“Man alive!” said he; “tell me all about it. Ah, the good news!”

“There is nothing to tell: he left it; that is all.”

“Oh, the good Seigneur,” cried Farette, “the grand Seigneur!”

Some one laughed scornfully in the doorway. It was Julie.

“Look there,” she cried; “he gets the land, and throws away the gun! Brag and coward, miller! It is for me to say ‘the grand Seigneur!'”

She tossed her head: she thought the old Seigneur had relented towards her. She turned away to the house with a flaunting air, and got her hat. At first she thought she would go to the House with the Tall Porch, but she changed her mind, and went to the Bois Noir instead. Parpon followed her a distance off. Behind, in the mill, Farette was chuckling and rubbing his hands.

Meanwhile, Armand was making his way towards the Bois Noir. All at once, in the shade of a great pine, he stopped. He looked about him astonished.

“This is the old place. What a fool I was, then!” he said.

At that moment Julie came quickly, and lifted her hands towards him. “Armand–beloved Armand!” she said.

Armand looked at her sternly, from her feet to her pitted forehead, then wheeled, and left her without a word.

She sank in a heap on the ground. There was a sudden burst of tears, and then she clinched her hands with fury.

Some one laughed in the trees above her–a shrill, wild laugh. She looked up frightened. Parpon presently dropped down beside her.

“It was as I said,” whispered the dwarf, and he touched her shoulder. This was the full cup of shame. She was silent.

“There are others,” he whispered again. She could not see his strange smile; but she noticed that his voice was not as usual. “Listen,” he urged, and he sang softly over her shoulder for quite a minute. She was amazed.

“Sing again,” she said.

“I have wanted to sing to you like that for many years,” he replied; and he sang a little more. “He cannot sing like that,” he wheedled, and he stretched his arm around her shoulder.

She hung her head, then flung it back again as she thought of Armand.

“I hate him!” she cried; “I hate him!”

“You will not throw meal on me any more, or call me idiot?” he pleaded.

“No, Parpon,” she said.

He kissed her on the cheek. She did not resent it. But now he drew away, smiled wickedly at her, and said: “See, we are even now, poor Julie!” Then he laughed, holding his little sides with huge hands. “Imbecile!” he added, and, turning, trotted away towards the Rock of Red Pigeons.

She threw herself, face forward, in the dusty needles of the pines.

When she rose from her humiliation, her face was as one who has seen the rags of harlequinade stripped from that mummer Life, leaving only naked being. She had touched the limits of the endurable; her sordid little hopes had split into fragments. But when a human soul faces upon its past, and sees a gargoyle at every milestone where an angel should be, and in one flash of illumination–the touch of genius to the smallest mind–understands the pitiless comedy, there comes the still stoic outlook.

Julie was transformed. All the possible years of her life were gathered into the force of one dreadful moment–dreadful and wonderful. Her mean vanity was lost behind the pale sincerity of her face–she was sincere at last. The trivial commonness was gone from her coquetting shoulders and drooping eyelids; and from her body had passed its flexuous softness. She was a woman; suffering, human, paying the price.