Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven/Chapter 4
IV
CAFÉ AU LAIT
The long, curving main street of the little harbour town looked very bright and clean. Half the houses seemed to have been just freshly painted; some were yellow, some white, and most of the roofs were red. There had been a little spring shower, too, and now the wet asphalt of the side-walk shone nearly as blue as the bright, new-washen sky, and the heart-shaped lilac-leaves in the little garden beside the shop were tossing in soft, moist airs, and glittering with wetness and light. One branch was in flower already, and its plumes of dark, chocolate buds, and blossoms of fresh, pale purple looked almost audaciously young. The old bush that bore it came of stock that had crossed the ocean more than half a century before; but what did this little bough care about that? its blossoms were new this year. As the wind swung it, now it sprang jauntily up towards the sky, now it swept down towards the springing green grass, and now it scattered a whole shower of sparkling rain-diamonds over the crown of Philippe’s rusty black hat, as he passed beneath the lilac-bush and out into the road.
The wife of the man to whom he had last year sold the shop, and with whom he now boarded, was standing at the open door beside the windowful of clocks. “Why, Mr. Philip!” she said, in a tone of diffident remonstrance, “ain’t it almost a bit too damp for you to get your walk to-day?” But old Philippe merely raised his hat, and stalked on past her. He did not like to be interfered with by people who had not the right—and who had? Mrs. Watchmaker Brown, for her part, looked after him with a mixture of feelings, as he took his way, rather waveringly, up the street. She was a kindly-hearted woman, but he was a “proud,” unsociable old man. He did look really very feeble. She could hardly help thinking that, if “anything should happen”. . . why, after all, it would be nice to have the whole house to themselves.
Poor “proud” Philippe! The air, as it blew in, sweet and fresh from the sea, gathered more sweetness yet from the blossomed gardens that divided the painted houses; Mrs. Selincourt’s wallflowers breathed so strong that even he could smell them; the sunshine soothed with a delicious warmth his withered, sunken cheek—it was spring, yes: but Philippe did not look much like spring. His bent and lean old figure, his cadaverous, pale face, spoke far more plainly of the end of things than of any fresh beginning. All the winter through, old Philippe had been ill. It was only within the last few days that he had been able to put on his queer “outlandish” shoes and get outside at all; and that famous cherry-wood stick of his, with the curling handle and the edelweiss-flower carved on it, really needed now to be what Bossu had in jest been wont to call it—“The old man’s third leg.”
Ah, Bossu . . . so he was gone! . . . buried a month ago, they said. Old Bossu, last but one of all those thirty-five shipmates who had come out to Pakarae from Havre upon La Belle Etoile, fifty-one years ago. Fifty-one years is a long time. They had built, those early settlers, that curving street of quaint, two-storeyed, gabled houses so much prettier than New Zealand houses are wont to be; they had planted the walnut-trees and willows, the peaches and poplars and the vines: they had bequeathed to this little, out-of-the-way angle of British territory its subtle, still persistent “foreign” flavour; and now they were all lying, all, all but one, very far away from Provence and Savoy, with white stones at their heads, in the little cemetery yonder, underneath the sighing pines.
Certainly they had left children; the old names were still to be seen upon the corners of the streets, and above shop-doors. But they were barbarously mispronounced, these names; and, as for the children, who had grown up in this, the country of their birth, they were all British now—there was to be found among them scarcely one who could make shift to stammer, and that with an accent truly frightful, three syllables of his father’s tongue. For the last five years, Philippe and Bossu had been the last remaining representatives of “la patrie,” the sole survivors of the “Originals.” . . . And Bossu now was gone!
Yes, he was gone! Here, halfway up the street, was his house, all shut up. The green shutters—Bossu’s was the only house that had retained the gay green shutters of Home—were fast closed; springing grasses, and darkly shining wreaths of periwinkles, lit with purple stars, hid kindly the unwashen step, and surged against the never-opening door. Upon the little lawn, smooth once as Bossu’s hairless head, the scythe was now sadly needed, and shears should long since have been used about the shell-paved weeping-ash arbour where the two old comrades had been wont to sit together, to smoke their pipes of modern (how inferior!) tobacco, to drink the Australian vintage that compared, how unfavourably! with the old, rough red vin du pays, and to speak one with another the dear old tongue. Bossu, it is true, had been of France, not of Switzerland, and had been wont, therefore, at times, to suggest alternatives to Philippe’s phrases and pronunciation; not always without a little natural irritation on both sides; Ninon had often had to allay excitement. Still he had been, in some sort after all, a compatriot, and in all ways a comrade.
And Ninon, too. Not so pretty, not so pretty, as that earlier, fresher Ninon, laid to rest—could it be, eh, mon Dieu! forty-two years since? in the little churchyard over there by the milk-white glacier-stream . . . but named for her, and young like her, and kind—Ninon, too, was gone away; they said, to the married sister in the North Island: there was nobody left! And a shingle, see! was off the roof; the chimney needed repairing, the gate swung loose. The old place was staunch enough to last for years to come, if it were but properly looked after, but, left all to itself like this, it would soon grow damp, it would quickly rot, and young Bossu would presently have excuse enough to pull it down and build upon its site that cheese-factory he was for ever speaking of. Milk and money, milk and money—that was all this country ever cared about. . . And the old house did remind one so of Home!
Ah-h-ha! What was this—this delicious, this reviving whiff of some perfume truly familiar? Coffee! Yes, coffee—in berries—being roasted. But who, then, actually roasted coffee still, in these lax days? Ah, Métrailleur, to be sure—Métrailleur fils, who kept the grocery store past which the old man’s feet were just now languidly bearing him: Joseph Métrailleur, who called himself nowadays Meat-railer, if you please! in deference, forsooth, to the British tongues of his customers. Yes, Joseph was roasting coffee beans—and when he had roasted them and ground them up, and tempered the flavour a little—oh, judiciously, without doubt, for Joseph was a worthy man—he would put the mixture into some tin whose lid was loose, or lost, perhaps; and in the course of the next six or seven months would sell it, doing it up in paper bags, to people who would make it as they did tea and then offer it one to drink. Did not he, Philippe, know? Sore had been his longing for some coffee during his tedious convalescence; and once, in response to his repeated requests and as a great treat for the poor old foreigner, Mrs. Brown, the well-meaning, the incapable, had served him, with noisy anticipations, a muddy tisane which it would have disgraced a pig to drink. But this, which Métrailleur had not yet gone beyond roasting—ah, this was coffee indeed! and Philippe halted his steps, and stood still for quite a little while outside the grocery door, drinking in, with his heart even more than his sense, that exquisite aroma—subtle, magical. Melmotte’s tame penguin, with its broken leg, its yellow eyes, that seldom spied a live fish nowadays, and useless flippers that never felt the waves, came waddling up to greet a fellow-exile, and assumed a portly, sprawling attitude almost upon Philippe’s feet. But the old man never noticed him—how should he? He was sixty years, and half the world, away. . . .
. . . Outside, all was shining. The early sunshine was bringing out every rich tone of brown and red in the resinous timbers of the old chalet. Inside, the coffee-berries were roasting, roasting. Ah, the good smell! Ah, the first morning freshness! Now he himself, Philippe, le petit Philippe, in his clean blue blouse and wooden shoes, stood dutifully crushing the brown berries in the coffee-mill fastened to the table . . . now, again, his mother bent above him with a shining-bright, long-spouted pot in either dexterous hand, from which the good streams of boiling milk, and real black coffee, velvety yet clear, descended to a perfect union within the handless bowl of green earthenware. And, all the while, the cuckoo calling and calling outside, and the rocky rivulet running down the mountain, merrily, even as he himself would presently run merrily down to school. . . . Ah, the good mother, the old home, the long, long ago! Jumbo, the penguin, tired of inattention, here pecked viciously at Philippe’s foot, and the old man moved absently on up the street.
Here was the Pakarae church-belfry: differently roofed with those red tiles, it was true, and rather squat than lofty, yet in its shape, a bell-hat on top of a tower, how curiously like the one at St. Armand! Upon the mountains on the other side the harbour there was still some snow—stainless as the snows of old, above Barue: and the harbour itself, so shut in by these spring-green paddocks, so satin-smooth to-day, did not look any more like the salt and separating sea, it looked precisely like the little lake of Mec; the jetty, too, though he had never noticed it before, was the wooden twin of that one to which old Mathieu’s boat had been wont to bring an occasional tourist in search of his father’s beautiful wood-carvings, his boiserie. . .
. . . What were these globe-like yellow flowers in old Mrs. Pochette’s garden? She had never had them before; or at least he had never remarked them before. Surely, surely—they were that very same yellow ranunculus of which he had been used to pluck bouquets for Ninon in that lush riverside pasture by old Fleury’s mill! Boules de beurre, she called them, or sometimes boules d’or—butter-balls, or balls of gold. He remembered! Only those flowers of Home were finer—everything at Home was finer. Why should he think so much of Home this morning? Hark! wasn’t that surely the cuckoo now? Alas, no; only a sea-bird, and how tired he felt all of a sudden! Miséricorde, how tired! Yonder to the right, only a very little way up the hill, was that sunny paddock of Métrailleur’s that had the dry rocks in it. He would go and sit a little on those rocks and rest. Why not? . . . There, at last! How very fatigued he was! Ah, how weary!
Métrailleur’s paddock was a long, grassy slope, with a fine view out over the lake above the clustered roofs of Pakarae. Just now, in all the glory of its spring verdure, it looked like a stripe of the freshest and softest green velvet, only here and there the exquisite surface was roughened by a little outcrop of grey, volcanic rock. A little below one such lichened ledge, on which Philippe had seated himself, there ran a belt of pine-trees; a snow peak soared above them in the distance across the harbour; and, beyond their spiry tips and between their latticed boughs, the lake spread out its blue, bloomy sheen, full of violet and green hill-mirrorings. There were cows in the paddock; cows with richly shining skins, of fawn and white and chestnut; and one of them, a velvety black creature, wore a bell about her neck, that tinkled musically as she browsed. The little bright, brown creek, on its headlong way through the paddock from the summits above to the sea beneath, tinkled also, and sprang from rock to rock with a shining and merry delight. And the sun was cloudless, the bright air was thin, and crisp, and pure; there was an Alpine look and feeling everywhere—it all was really very like Switzerland. Philippe, as he sat there resting in the sun, began mistily to wonder which of the spring Alp-flowers were out yet, and actually looked about him for some, in the fresh, green grass. For the little thin white crocus that follows the heel of the melting snows it was of course too late, and for the fairy fringe of the violet soldanella; but a cowslip or two, surely? some gay little bright pink primula, or sulphur-coloured anemone? above all, at least one gentian, one bright little star of heaven’s own blue, to look up at one with the face of a friend upon this sunny, green Alp?
There was, of course, not one. Moreover, the little hut beside the pines, as Philippe’s fixed gaze at last slowly apprehended it, revealed itself most plainly to be wrought of no dear picturesque dark timbers, but of galvanised iron only, pale and ugly. The old man roused himself out of his waking dream. He sighed. Ah, yes! it might certainly all be very like, but it was not the same—it was not Home! There are times when similarities do but accentuate a difference; and a wave of the most bitter yearning and homesickness overwhelmed poor Philippe now as he sat there in the sun.
O for the Real Things—for the lake that was not salt, for the streamlet that flowed from snows, for the grass all full of flowers! O for the old Home landscape, for the old, familiar speech, for the dear, the true, the real, the right, old ways! Philippe had not been in Switzerland for half a century; his youthful manhood, his prime, his age, had all been passed in New Zealand; and he was in general extremely proud of his adopted country, of her beauty, her resources, her rapid growth, her happy and spring-like prospects. But now, on this radiant morning, whether it was the result of his years, of his illness, or of some rare climatic quality of the day, it seemed to him that he had made a great mistake, that he had been somehow duped, defrauded, ruined; that he had been made to spend all his strength, all his life, in the wrong place. And for the right one, for that far-away lost country, of his childhood, of his early strength, of his first and only love, a desperate longing fed by all these strangely reawakened memories and associations grew and grew, until it overwhelmed him: until there was no more room in his mind for anything but remembrance, no more room in his heart for anything but regret. It was the true, the terrible nostalgia. He wanted his country, his own familiar country, as a little child wants its mother, as a sick child cannot do without her; and the slow, pathetic, helpless tears of old age escaped from his closed eyes, and ran down his pallid cheeks unhindered.
So possessed was he by the agony of this strong yet impotent yearning that he never noticed certain shuffling footsteps which now came near to him, and halted, and then again shuffled hesitatingly away. Presently, however, they returned.
“Mister finds himself not well?” a voice said softly. Philippe opened his eyes with a start.
An old woman was standing before him. She had on a brown stuff dress, bulkily gathered in at the waist, and a large apron of very dark blue linen; on her head, instead of a hat, there was a three-cornered yellow checked handkerchief; and under one arm she carried a round wooden milking-stool, in the other hand a bucket of milk. Just so, exactly, Philippe remembered his own mother to have looked, on any midday of her life; and he looked at the vision in bewilderment. Yet this woman was not his mother—she had not his mother’s face. Her own, however, was full of so mother-like a compassion and sympathy that it spoke straight to his heart, and drew an answer from it.
“I have been ill,” he faltered, as naturally and as appealingly as a child; and then he felt ashamed, and turned away his head. He did not know how far that child-like impulse had decoyed him, or that he had spoken those words not only in the tone but in the speech in which he would have said them to his mother. But his hearer did, for it was the patois of her own native canton that she had heard.
“Eh, mon Dieu!” she ejaculated; “mon Dieu!” She set down, first, her bucket of milk and her stool with all the carefulness of the good housewife; and then she clasped her hands, looked up with streaming eyes to heaven, and addressed, surely to every saint in the calendar, a medley of thanks and lamentations and thanks again, of which Philippe understood every word, for it, too, was in his native tongue.
“You are of Mec, ma mère, of Boissy?” he inquired with eagerness, when at length she paused for breath.
“I am of Evremond, monsieur,” she replied. Philippe grew very white. It had been the village next his own.
“Ah, you know then the bridge,” he said hoarsely. “You know the church of St. Armand? And the house of Martin the miller, that stands midway between the church and the bridge?” He could scarcely breathe as he finished.
“But which bridge?” inquired the old woman. “And which church would monsieur distinguish, since there now are several? But as for the house of Père Martin, the miller—ah, yes—but it is twenty years since that was pulled down. There stands a fine, magnificent hotel in its place now,” she added with pride, “and the railway runs by the stream.”
“How! Through Fleury’s pasture?” cried Philippe in dismay.
“Fleury’s pasture? I know it not. But yes, it is of course that, that, in these days, is the station,” she replied. “One sees well that monsieur certainly cannot have been at St. Armand within these great many years. Oho, the little place! it has grown all out of the memory of that which it used to be, as a little child grows out of his shift. Many people come now to St. Armand year by year. The steamboat brings them twice in the day, and, of a summer evening, the band plays on the fine pier where once was the old black jetty; and the pleasure-parties dance.
“And the churchyard?” Philippe stammered out. He was growing paler and paler.
“The churchyard? Oh, the churchyard of the old, the little, church—that, yes, assuredly that remains,” she answered soothingly, with quick, instinctive comprehension.
Apparently, however, it was almost all that did remain of Philippe’s own old St. Armand. To every one of his succeeding questions her answers came ever the same. “Gone, changed, this or that instead.” The little secluded hamlet had in fact been “discovered” by tourists and hotel-proprietors; and Philippe as he listened perceived, with a horrible sinking of the heart, that, could he at that moment have been miraculously restored to his native place, he would have found it unrecognisable. Home? Home was gone; it no more existed; it was no longer real. There was no such place in the world any more! A dizziness came over him.
“Monsieur must please to drink!” said the old woman’s voice in his ear, with a note of authority. She was supporting his head, Philippe suddenly found, and holding to his lips a wooden bowl, the like of which he had not seen for fifty years. Somehow, he did not seem to mind this woman’s ministrations—they were not at all like poor Mrs. Brown’s—and he obeyed her without irritation, and swallowed the draught of warm milk. It revived him.
“A bowl of coffee would have been better,” he heard her mutter as though to herself, and was able actually to smile.
“Seat yourself, ma mère,” he presently directed in his turn. “And tell me how it comes that you too are at Pakarae.”
It was very simple. The old woman, it appeared, was Joseph Métrailleur’s grandmother. Her husband had died, over there at Evremond, some months before, and she had found herself without kith or kin or any one to look after (“I, who am still so very strong, monsieur,”’ she said, in a tone of expostulation), excepting these unseen, far-away relations in New Zealand. After them, since she was one of those to whom all kin seem kind, her heart had longed; to them surely she might be of use in the new, rough country? So she had written to them, begging piteously that she might come out, and Joseph’s good, impulsive heart had been touched; he had assented, he had helped, she had arrived at Pakarae during the winter, while Philippe had been ill—and now here she was, poor soul! forbidden by both pride and sense of fairness, to beg for repatriation (“Only figure to yourself, monsieur, the expense! and whom, in addition, have I, there?”), and yet a most bewildered stranger in a most strange land, unbelievably homesick, and lonelier, alas! than ever. For Joseph, yes, he was indeed a good one, he, a perfect heart of gold, but ever at the shop: Suzanne the wife, she too, oh certainly, was also good, but . . . as was no more than natural, she had her own ways, she did not understand the old woman’s, she did not require her help: while as for the child, the little Suzee—the old dame stopped abruptly.
“And you?” asked Philippe. “What is your name?”
It was, if monsieur pleased, she answered meekly, “Nanette.” Nanette! It sounded so like “Ninon” that Philippe’s face grew white again. Nanette was much concerned.
“It is very easy to see,” she observed, “that monsieur has indeed been ill. Monsieur requires attention, above all, he should have nourishing food. A good soup, now, with cabbage in it, a cutlet, a tender poulet with salad, a flask of white wine, and a good little cup of coffee to bury it all—black, with cognac.”
Philippe felt his long-lost appetite come suddenly back as she enumerated with zest the savoury details of this once-familiar menu. It was with a heart-felt sigh that he answered, perhaps a little impatiently:
“Yes, yes! But then it is impossible to get such things here—the right things—properly prepared”
“Why not? I will wager that I can prepare them,” interrupted Nanette with a confident chuckle—which ended in the middle, however, and her good old face clouded over. “It is true!” she said, in her turn with a sigh. “I have not my own kitchen, my own utensils. Here, one puts the potatoes into the water, the gigot into the oven, by and by one makes the mouth-wrying tea, the tisane that so ravages the interior—and the dinner is served. One eats, one is fed, it is true; but that is not to say one has dined. The very stomach is an exile in this land.”
And Philippe sadly assented. He knew so well that dinner, even now awaiting him at Mrs. Brown’s. A thousand times already he had eaten of it, and the thousand and first made no appeal to him. Most of all did his languid appetite resent the suggestion of that “long-stood” cup of tea. Tea, indeed! Again he seemed to smell the aroma of that coffee, freshly roasting at the store; and again it spoke to him of comforts, not so much of the body as of the mind, the heart.
They talked on and on, still in the old pleasant dialect. Nanette was younger than Philippe; she had married early in life, and so had her son, the father of Joseph; still, she was able to tell her countryman the fortunes of nearly all the old friends he so eagerly inquired after, and, alas, alas! those fortunes, as it seemed, with scarcely one exception, were all finished! Philippe felt his heart, his horizon, painfully contract. Each death, as Nanette recorded it in her simple chronicle, sounded to him like yet another stroke of the tolling bell at the burial of all that had once made Home. He sighed again and again as she proceeded. What was there left? And yet, for all the sadness, what a sweetness, too, in hearing again those well-loved names, in speaking the remembered childhood tongue, in being understood!
“Gran’ma! gran’ma!” called suddenly a very shrill and consequential little voice; and in at the paddock-gate next minute there ran a very emphatic little girl. With her starchy pinafore-frills, her perked-up hair-ribbon, her lifted eyebrows and sharp little nose, she somehow presented the effect of having been sharpened into a point all over. “Why, here you are, all the time! an’ I’ve been hunting an’ hunting for you, gran’ma,” she proclaimed indignantly. “You’re just to come right straight home this very minnut—mumma says so. Here’s mumma coming now, her own self,” she ended, with a pout; and in fact a very stout woman, with a large, florid, good-natured, but rather stupid face, was to be seen just entering the paddock-gate. She puffed and panted as she came.
“Why, gran’ma,” she called out wheezily, “I’m sure I’m right-down glad to see you safe. We just couldn’t make out what was keepin’ you—thought old Blackberry must ha’ knocked you over or something. Joe, he’s a-give her that black cow, an’ she will milk her midday, as well as mornin’ an’ evenin’—an’ it does keep the dinner about so,” added Mrs. Métrailleur, between gasps, and rather apologetically, to Philippe, of whom, like almost everybody else in Pakarae, including even the acute little Susy, she stood somewhat in awe.
“It is the custom, where she comes from,” Philippe answered stiffly. He did not like to see the bewildered, helpless expression now stultifying Nanette’s kindly face; she looked nearly as dull as Mrs. Métrailleur herself. “We are of the same country, Madame and I,” he added, with a courteous bow in her direction.
“Why now, just think o’ that!” responded the worthy Mrs. Métrailleur, mildly interested. “It’s a pity you don’t want no housekeeper, Mr. Philippe—not but what I know Mrs. Brown does for you, an’ she’s as good as the next two, as they say. On’y you’d understand the old lady’s ways, an’ her lingo, an’ they’re both beyond me, I’m sure. Been sick quite a long time, ain’t you? You must mind an’ take good care o’ yourself now—look as if you could do with a real good old feedin’ up, so you do—an’ that reminds me, gran’ma, your dinner will be all dried; I put it in the oven; Susy an’ I done ours. You won’t come in an’ have a bite with her, Mr. Philippe, I s’pose? I’d make you a real good cup o’ tea. . . . Well, you must drop in some other time, then, an’ have a chat with gran’ma. We’d be pleased to see you any time, I’m sure. Joseph, he was sayin’ on’y at breakfast what a lot he thought o’ you. Come on, gran’ma. Bless you, she don’t take in more than half a word at a time o’ what I say! Goodbye, Mr. Philippe.”
“Come on, gran’ma!” repeated Susy, officiously. “An’ why ever in the world didn’t you go an’ put a hat on, instead of that silly old hankey?” she added loudly as they went away—resolved that Mr. Philippe should see there was one member of the family knew what was proper, anyhow. Susy was universally reckoned “a pretty smart little girl.”
Philippe watched the three of them thoughtfully, as they crossed the paddock and entered Métrailleur’s back-door; he sat thinking for a minute or two longer, and then he too left the velvety paddock, and went back down the street. Like the poor old Nanette, he also was late for dinner; and Mrs. Brown, although she would not dare to scold, he knew would have upon her face that aggrieved, martyr-like expression that he found always so peculiarly irritating. As for the dinner, the dinner could go to the dog—the only creature it was fit for. . . . That coffee still smelt very good as he passed the store. What if he stopped and bought some? A little of it for breakfast, now, mixed with plenty of good milk—the milk of this country was all right, if it could be flavoured with coffee. Ah, but then, the coffee must be made, not murdered! It was no use buying any to take home to Mrs. Brown.
There were two men busy by the fence of old Bossu’s house as he came past. They were putting up a sign—“To Let,” it said, quite plainly. Young Bossu did not mean to pull the old place down just yet, then—Ah! . . . Philippe stood suddenly stock-still, staring at the green shutters but not seeing them at all, in the full radiance of the idea that, ever since Mrs. Métrailleur’s remarks, had been slowly dawning on his mind. He, Philippe, was not poor; the old house was not large; Bossu fils could not demand an extortionate rent, and, in the little paddock at the back, Nanette could keep her cow. Such were the simple, practical thoughts that were at work, altering his whole world for him. The old woman, the old house, the old man—why not convert them all, by associating them in one companionship, into a little remnant of departed Home?
No rash idea of marriage was in old Philippe’s mind. Nanette, the withered everyday housewife, could never be a rival to Ninon, the ideal, the ever-young—neither would she, in her peasant meekness, ever dream of such a thing. But she could be his housekeeper, his bonne; they could have again, between them, the old tongue, the old ways, the memories of old. She would not have to put up any longer with Mrs. Métrailleur and the terrible Susy; he could escape from Mrs. Brown. Nanette could make him omelettes, like his mother’s; he could eat them out of doors, within the leafy ash-tree arbour, as they used to eat at Home. . . Ah, Home! Home was gone, vanished, dead—surviving only in his brain—and in hers. . . . Well, one must just make the best of where one was; there would be something to make the best of, now. Why, she could make him coffee! Swiss coffee to mingle with New Zealand milk. . . . Eh, and what if, at the same time, one could mingle with the insipidity of the present something of the poetry, the aroma, of the beloved past?
Café au lait, properly prepared, is delicious. . . .
Poor Mrs. Brown, watching with long-suffering Philippe’s tardy progress down the street, had presently the additional annoyance of seeing him, when he had at last got within two yards of her gate, suddenly cross the road, and walk into young Bossu’s, with a step grown wonderfully firm.