"Nothing matters but that--but Rosalie," he said to himself as he turned
to look out of the window at the wrangling dogs gnawing bones. "Here she
is in the midst of all I once knew, and I know that I am no more a part
of it than she is. She and Kathleen may have met face to face in these
streets--who can tell! The world is large, but there's a sort of
whipper-in of Fate, who drives the people wearing the same livery into
one corner in the end. If they met"--he rose and walked hastily up and
down--"what then? I have a feeling that Rosalie would recognise her as
plainly as though the word Kathleen were stitched on her breast."

There was a clock on the wall. He looked at it. "It will not be safe to
go out until evening. Then I can go to the hospital, and watch her
coming out." He realised with satisfaction that many people coming from
Mass must pass the inn. There was a chance of his seeing Rosalie, if she
had gone to early Mass. This street lay in her way from the hospital.
"One look--ah, one look!" For this one look he had come. For this, and
to secure that which would save Rosalie from want always, if anything
should happen to him. This too had been greatly on his mind. There was
a way to give her what was his very own, which would rob no one and serve
her well indeed.

Looking at his face in the mirror over the mantel, he said to himself

"I might have had ten thousand friends, yet I have a thousand enemies,
who grin at the memory of the drunken fop down among the eels and the
cat-fish. Every chance was with me then. I come back here, and--and
Jolicoeur tells me the brutal truth. But if I had had ambition"--a wave
of the feeling of the old life passed over him--"if I had had ambition as
I was then, I should have been a monster. It was all so paltry that, in