She was wont to wake up suddenly in the morning--the very early
morning--with the imagined sound of the gold Cock of Beaugard crowing in
her ears. Memory, memory, memory--yet never a word, and never a hearsay
of what had happened at the Manor Cartier since she had left it! Then
there came a time when she longed intensely to see Jean Jacques before
she died, though she could not bring herself to send word to him. She
dreaded what the answer might be--not Jean Jacques' answer, but the answer
of Life. Jean Jacques and her child, her Zoe--more his than hers in years
gone by--one or both might be dead! She dared not write, but she
cherished a desire long denied. Then one day she saw everything in her
life more clearly than she had ever done. She found an old book of French
verse, once belonging to Mme. Popincourt's husband, who had been a
professor. Some lines therein opened up a chamber of her being never
before unlocked. At first only the feeling of the thing came, then slowly
the spiritual meaning possessed her. She learnt it by heart and let it
sing to her as she lay half-sleeping and half-waking, half-living and
half-dying:
"There is a World; men compass it through tears,
Dare doom for joy of it; it called me o'er the foam;
I found it down the track of sundering years,
Beyond the long island where the sea steals home.
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