"I thank you, monsieur. He is very tired." She held the light toward the rough bunk, and Dick stooped over it, feeling for the pulse in the knotted, sinewy wrist. The dignity in the withered old face and the slow, refined tongue had over-set him for the moment, and the weak passage of the blood through the old thin body on the bunk told him more than he was quite ready to put into words. For his own young vigorous life and his knowledge gave him the truth without hesitation.
He pulled his flask out and lifted the half-unconscious man. Anything was better than inaction with that grave, sweet face looking out of the shadows.
"He has lived a long and a difficult life, madame," he said civilly.
"And he was not fitted for it," she said. "Mary, the mother of all men, will give this man his rest."
Dick shot one glance at her.
"Then you know it, madame?" he said. "I—I was afraid"
She smiled just a little, holding the slush-light near.
"Love has quicker eyes than the eyes of a stranger, monsieur," she said; and Dick, half-abashed, laid the grey head back on the grass-stuffed pillow, and took the light from her hand.
"Let me put it aside," he said. "It is not needed. I do not think he will suffer, monsieur, your husband."
"Bien," she said softly as the sigh of a breeze, and sat on the bunk-side holding the chilling, withered hand between her own.
Dick trod gently to the window and waited there, astride of a box. He felt the hush of her great acceptance of the inevitable closing down on him. Out of the storms and the sordid things that were breaking his own life he had come twice to-day into the beauty and the purity and the wisdom of love: those two in the forest with the child between them, strong and glad, beginning a new life together; these two in poverty and age and death, parting in the dark with a stranger as witness. He sat very still with his head in his hands, and beyond the open window the breath of the living night went by.
The man on the bed stirred, muttering. Then the old
