He found Mrs. Joe awaiting him in the room he had left. "Be very kind to her, mother," he said. "She will have something to tell you."
He smiled. "I shall not be the hero of the tale. Father Cameril is the lucky man. After all, it is better. I could not have made her happy as she deserves to be. I am glad I was prevented from offering her----" He hesitated.
"An insult," he answered curtly, as he left the room, strolling toward Eliphalet's tomb.
And at Eliphalet's tomb he recognized that Natalie had been wise. Now that it was lost to him he knew that his last long-neglected chance for happiness was gone. Happiness! Perhaps the word meant too much, but in Paula's companionship he could at least have found, in time, contentment and cheerfulness, and are these not happiness, the highest happiness? What now was left him? Money, heaps of money! It barred the way to honorable ambition; its heavy weight lay on his heart, breeding therein suspicion of the love or friendship of all men and women. For him life must be a solitude. He could never lie beside a wife assured that he had won her for himself. He knew that the deadly poison of distrust must ever and ever more thoroughly taint his being, distorting his vision and rendering the aspect of all things hateful. Yet how many thousand men, whose clothes and dinners were assured them, would be glad to change places with him! "But all I have are clothes and food," he muttered.
"We are all poor critters!" Deacon Bedott had spoken words of wisdom. "But the poorest of all is the Rich Man, Deacon," he said.
And then bethought him that by this time Paula and Father Cameril would have made their great announcement. "Little Paula!" he murmured. "Well, she shall have joyous wedding bells, at least, and smiling faces. For the rest let the fond Father look to it!"
The summer sun beat pitilessly upon the burnished cobble stones, driving from the crooked street all except the geese, and even these only languidly stretched their necks, hissing inhospitably at the heels of the dusty wayfarer, the sole object of interest to the landlord of the Red-Ox, who stood in the gateway of his hostelry and blinked in the glare of the sun. "Too old for a student," he muttered, "and no spectacles. Perhaps an artist." As the pedestrian came nearer a puzzled gleam, half of recognition, spread over his features. The dusty traveler stopped. "And so you are here yet!" and he slapped the broad shoulder of the host.