At last a thought came to him--the key to the situation as it seemed, the
one thing necessary to meet the financial situation. He would sell the
biggest farm he owned, which had been to him in its importance like the
flour-mill itself. He had had an offer for it that very day, and a
bigger offer still a week before. It was mortgaged to within eight
thousand dollars of what it could be sold for but, if he could gain time,
that eight thousand dollars would build the mill again. M. Mornay, the
Big Financier, would certainly see that this was his due--to get his
chance to pull things straight. Yes, he would certainly sell the
Barbille farm to-morrow. With this thought in his mind he went to sleep
at last, and he did not wake till the sun was high.

It was a sun of the most wonderful brightness and warmth. Yesterday it
would have made the Manor Cartier and all around it look like Arcady.
But as it shone upon the ruins of the mill, when Jean Jacques went out
into the working world again, it made so gaunt and hideous a picture
that, in spite of himself, a cry of misery came from his lips.

Through all the misfortunes which had come to him the outward semblance
of things had remained, and when he went in and out of the plantation of
the Manor Cartier, there was no physical change in the surroundings,
which betrayed the troubles and disasters fallen upon its overlord.
There it all was just as it had ever been, and seeming to deny that
anything had changed in the lives of those who made the place other than
a dead or deserted world. When Carmen went, when Zoe fled, when his
cousin Auguste Charron took his flight, when defeats at law abashed him,
the house and mills, and stores and offices, and goodly trees, and well-
kept yards and barns and cattle-sheds all looked the same. Thus it was
that he had been fortified. In one sense his miseries had seemed unreal,
because all was the same in the outward scene. It was as though it all