Aye, and better than all, and more than all, here was Zoe
Barbille drawing her mother's attention to him almost in the embrace of
the magnificent jurist.
The Judge, with his small, round, quizzical eyes which missed nothing,
saw too; and his attention was strangely arrested by the faces of both
the mother and the child. His first glance at the woman's face made him
flash an inward light on the memory of Jean Jacques' face in the
witness-box, and a look of reflective irony came into his own. The face
of Carmen Dolores, wife of the philosophic miller and money-master, did
not belong to the world where she was placed--not because she was so
unlike the habitant women, or even the wives of the big farmers, or the
sister of the Cure, or the ladies of the military and commercial exiles
who lived in that portion of the province; but because of an alien
something in her look--a lonely, distant sense of isolation, a something
which might hide a companionship and sympathy of a rare kind, or might be
but the mask of a furtive, soulless nature. In the child's face was
nothing of this. It was open as the day, bright with the cheerfulness of
her father's countenance, alive with a humour which that countenance did
not possess. The contour was like that of Jean Jacques, but with a
fineness and delicacy to its fulness absent from his own; and her eyes
were a deep and lustrous brown, under a forehead which had a boldness of
gentle dignity possessed by neither father nor mother.
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