"Our mother was a proud woman," she said, calmly, as she surveyed it. "Louis and I were shod in velvet, while our playmates had to be content with leather. We always played together," she went on, holding up the shoe, and speaking in a voice of unnatural calm. "He was a handsome little lad. Though I was much older, he used to put his arm around my neck and call me his little Jane." Justin silently pointed to the tiny sole. On it was written in a faltering hand, "Little Jane's shoe,--carried over half the world by her unworthy Louis." "Oh, my God," she said, suddenly. "I loved him so!" and staggering against the wall she burst into violent and painful weeping. "My poor lost brother--and I would have died for him-- Go away, young man, don't look at me in my misery." Justin's own eyes were full of tears. In distressed sympathy he went for a glass of water that she would not drink. "Go away, go away," she said, waving her hands at him, so that at last he was obliged to take his station on the street where the white pony stood gazing at him in reproachful anxiety. In a quarter of an hour Miss Gastonguay came out. Her face was more stern than usual, but bore no traces of tears, and without a word to him, and looking neither to the right nor to the left, she took the road to French Cross, followed by the pony with sympathetically drooping head. CHAPTER XII. IT IS ALL TRUE. After Miss Gastonguay left Justin, his long legs carried him rapidly in the direction of his own home, over the sidewalks, steaming in the hot March sun, and cooling again in the wind. There she was, waiting for him by the letter-box on the corner,--the rounded girlish figure, whose sight always made his blood quicken in his veins. His eye ran approvingly over her trim green suit, and the round hat set so daintily on the fair head, and with a few quick strides he was beside her. "I have kept you waiting, Derrice. I had an important interview." "You need not apologise. I knew that you would have come sooner if you could." He gave her so eloquent a glance that the blood rushed to her face, yet she did not shyly avert her blushes from him as she once would have done, but returned his look by one full of a passionate and steady devotion. He did not speak again until they were walking down the steep hill toward the town, when he asked her, "Which way shall we go?" "Not by the river," and she shivered, "out toward the prison." It was his turn to shiver now; however, he made no protest, and they were soon well on the way toward French Cross. "I forgot," she said, suddenly pausing, "one can still catch glimpses of the river from here, and I can not bear it to-day. Can we not strike out toward the blueberry barrens?" "Certainly, but the mud."