Neither of these two adventurers into a wild world of feeling noticed
that a man was sitting on a little knoll under a tree, not far away from
their meeting-place, busy with pencil and paper.
It was Jean Jacques, who had also come to the river-bank to work out a
business problem which must be settled on the morrow. He had stolen out
immediately after supper from neighbours who wished to see him, and had
come here by a roundabout way, because he wished to be alone.
George Masson and Carmen were together for a few moments only, but Jean
Jacques heard his wife say, "Yes, to-morrow--for sure," and then he saw
her kiss the master-carpenter--kiss him twice, thrice. After which they
vanished, she in one direction, and the invader and marauder in another.
If either of these two had seen the face of the man with a pencil and
paper under the spreading beechtree, they would not have been so
impatient for tomorrow, and Carmen would not have said "for sure."
Jean Jacques was awake at last, man as well as philosopher.
CHAPTER VIII
THE GATE IN THE WALL
Jean Jacques was not without originality of a kind, and not without
initiative; but there were also the elements of the very old Adam in him,
and the strain of the obvious. If he had been a real genius, rather than
a mere lively variation of the commonplace--a chicken that could never
burst its shell, a bird which could not quite break into song--he might
have made his biographer guess hard and futilely, as to what he would do
after having seen his wife's arms around the neck of another man than
himself--a man little more than a manual labourer, while he, Jean Jacques
Barbille, had come of the people of the Old Regime.
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