IF SHE HAD KNOWN IN TIME

Nothing stops when we stop for a time, or for all time, except ourselves.
Everything else goes on--not in the same way; but it does go on. Life
did not stop at St. Saviour's after Jean Jacques made his exit. Slowly
the ruined mill rose up again, and very slowly indeed the widow of Palass
Poucette recovered her spirits, though she remained a widow in spite of
all appeals; but M. Fille and his sister never were the same after they
lost their friend. They had great comfort in the dog which Jean Jacques
had given to them, and they roused themselves to a malicious pleasure
when Bobon, as he had been called by Zoe, rushed out at the heels of an
importunate local creditor who had greatly worried Jean Jacques at the
last. They waited in vain for a letter from Jean Jacques, but none came;
nor did they hear anything from him, or of him, for a long, long time.

Jean Jacques did not mean that they should. When he went away with his
book of philosophy and his canary he had but one thing in his mind, and
that was to find Zoe and make her understand that he knew he had been in
the wrong. He had illusions about starting life again, in which he
probably did not believe; but the make-believe was good for him. Long
before the crash came, in Zoe's name--not his own--he had bought from the
Government three hundred and twenty acres of land out near the Rockies
and had spent five hundred dollars in improvements on it.

There it was in the West, one remaining asset still his own--or rather
Zoe's--but worth little if he or she did not develop it. As he left St.
Saviour's, however, he kept fixing his mind on that "last domain," as he
called it to himself. If this was done intentionally, that he might be
saved from distraction and despair, it was well done; if it was a real
illusion--the old self-deception which had been his bane so often in the