"_Nom de Dieu!_" muttered Aristide, walking about the tiny parlour. "_Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!_" He stood in front of her and flung out his arms wide. "But without Jean and you life will have no meaning for me. I shall die. I shall fade away. I shall perish. Tell me, dear Miss Anne, what they are saying, the miserable peasants with souls of mud." But Anne could tell him no more. It had been hateful and degrading to tell him so much. She shivered through all her purity. After a barren discussion she held out her hand, large and generous like herself. "Good-bye"--she hesitated for the fraction of a second--"Good-bye, Aristide. I promise you shall provide for Jean's future. I will bring him up to London now and then to see you. We will find some way out of the difficulty. But you see, don't you, that you must leave Beverly Stoke?" Aristide went back to his comfortless lodgings aflame with bewilderment, indignation and despair. He fell upon Mrs. Buttershaw, a slatternly and sour-visaged woman, and hurled at her a tornado of questions. She responded with the glee of a hag, and Aristide learned the amazing fact that in the matter of sheer uncharitableness, unkindness and foulness of thought Beverly Stoke, with its population of three hundred hinds, could have brought down upon it the righteous indignation of Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon, Paris, and London. For a fortnight or so Anne Honeywood's life in the village had been that of a pariah dog. "And now you've spoke of it yourself," said Mrs. Buttershaw, her hands on her hips, "I'm glad. I'm a respectable woman, I am, and go to church regularly, and I don't want to be mixed up in such goings on. And I never have held with foreigners, anyway. And the sooner you find other lodgings, the better." For the first and only time in his life words failed Aristide Pujol. He stood in front of the virtuous harridan, his lips working, his fingers convulsively clutching the air. "You--you--you--you naughty woman!" he gasped, and, sweeping her away from the doorway of his box of a sitting-room, he rushed up to his tinier bedroom and in furious haste packed his portmanteau. "I would rather die than sleep another night beneath your slanderous roof," he cried at the foot of the stairs. "Here is more than your week's money." He flung a couple of gold coins on the floor and dashed out into the darkness and the rain. He hammered at Anne Honeywood's door. She opened it in some alarm. "You?--but----" she stammered.