.

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.

As it was, this magnate of St.Saviour's, who yesterday posed so sympathetically and effectively in the Court at Vilray as a figure of note, did the quite obvious thing: he determined to kill the master-carpenter from Laplatte.
There was no genius in that.

When, from under the spreading beech-tree, Jean Jacques saw his wife footing it back to her house with a light, wayward step; when he watched the master-carpenter vault over a stone fence five feet high with a smile of triumph mingled with doubt on his face, he was too stunned at first to move or speak.