"And I expected to see him full of joy and health!"
"It is not my fault, Mr. Pujol," said Miss Anne.
He started. "But no. How could it be? You loved him when you first set eyes on him at Aix-en-Provence."
Miss Anne began to cry. "God knows," said she, "what I should do without him. The dear mite is all that is left to me."
"All? But there is your sister, the dear Miss Janet."
Miss Anne's eyes were hidden in her handkerchief. "My poor sister died last year, Mr. Pujol."
"I am very sorry. I did not know," said Aristide gently.
There was a short silence. "It was a great sorrow to you," he said.
"It was God's will," said Anne. Then, after another pause, during which she dried her eyes, she strove to smile. "Tell me about yourself. How do you come to be here?"
Aristide replied in a hesitating way. He was in the presence of grief and sickness and trouble; the Provençal braggadocio dropped from him and he became the simple and childish creature that he was. He accounted very truthfully, very convincingly, for his queer life; for his abandonment of little Jean, for his silence, for his sudden and unexpected appearance. During the ingenuous _apologia pro vita sua_ Miss Anne regarded him with her honest candour.
"Janet and I both understood," she said. "Janet was gifted with a divine comprehension and pity. The landlady at the hotel, I remember, said some unkind things about you; but we didn't believe them. We felt that you were a good man--no one but a good man could have written that letter--we cried over it--and when she tried to poison our minds we said to each other: 'What does it matter? Here God in his mercy has given us a child.' But, Mr. Pujol, why didn't you take us into your confidence?"
"My dear Miss Anne," said Aristide, "we of the South do things impulsively, by lightning flashes. An idea comes suddenly. _Vlan!_ we carry it out in two seconds. We are not less human than the Northerner, who reflects two months."
"That is almost what dear, wise Janet told me," said Miss Anne.
"Then you know in your heart," said Aristide, after a while, "that if I had not been only a football at the feet of fortune, I should never have deserted little Jean?"
"I do, Mr. Pujol. My sister and I have been footballs, too." She added with a change of tone: "You tell me you saw our dear home at Chislehurst?"