122 Pierre Gascon life to the seeing eye. It was the face of a child grown old in the smallest part of childishness, and the white hair that crowned it struck a note of curious incongruity. He hung upon the fringes of life as a cobweb may hang upon a briar ; he breathed like ordinary men, but was divorced from the human impulses of the body ; he had chosen his way and followed it almost to the end ; and the end, he thought, because it still seemed far off, should be of a piece with the rest.
One only of the associates of his early youth ever visited him. He was a physician in the town which smoked on the horizon ; and sometimes Doctor Carton, snatching a few hours from the per sistent ardour of his occupation, would bring within the walls of Pierre Gascon's house the only manlike element that ever came there. The Doctor had watched the course of the man, whom he had known in his boyhood, with a growing wonder that at last had settled into a steady flame of scorn. He, coming fresh from the great city, where life and death jostled together on the footways, where crime and virtue lived side by side in apparent union, and where the passions of the soul broke loose in strenuous mastery, was amazed at this man who knew nothing of it all. Sometimes he found it in his heart to pity him, but it was less a pity of the emotions than of the mind, a mental exercise that left no good with the bestower. The Doctor was steeped in the mystery and strange ness of life, in the element which it was his task to nurture ; and his familiarity with death but strung him to a higher note of pur pose. In Pierre Gascon he saw a man to whom death meant nothing but dissolution, and he shuddered to think that this man had once been young.
The Doctor had not seen Pierre Gascon for many months, and one day, thinking of him as he hurried along the street, he dispatched his business at an earlier hour than usual, and, towards evening,
