“D’Arthenay, tenez foi!”

And he had been strengthened, and lived and died in the faith of his father.  Many people in the village scouted this story, and called it child’s foolishness, but there were some who liked to believe it, and who pointed out that these words were not carved deeply and regularly, like the rest of the inscription, but roughly scratched, as if with a sharp point.  And that although merely so scratched, they had never been effaced, but were even more easily read than the carven script.

Among those who held it for foolishness was the present Jacques De Arthenay.  He was perhaps the fifth in descent from the old Huguenot, but he might have been his own son or brother.  The Huguenot doctrines had only grown a little colder, a little harder, turned into New England Orthodoxy as it was understood fifty years ago.  He thought little of his French descent or his noble blood.  He pronounced his name Jakes, as all his neighbors did; he lived on his farm, as they lived on theirs.  If it was a better farm, the land in better condition, the buildings and fences trimmer and better cared for, that was in the man, not in his circumstances.  He was easily leader among the few men whose scattered dwellings made up the village of Sea Meadows (commonly pronounced Semedders.) His house did not lie on the little “street,” as that part of the road was called where some half-dozen houses were clustered together, with their farms spreading out behind them, and the post-office for the king-pin; yet no important step would be taken by the villagers without the advice and approval of Jacques De Arthenay.  Briefly, he was a born leader; a masterful man, with a habit of thinking before he spoke; and when he said a thing must be done, people were apt to do it.  He was now thirty years old, without kith or kin that any one knew of; living by himself in a good house, and keeping it clean and decent, almost as a woman might; not likely ever to change his condition, it was supposed.

This was the man who happened to come into the street on some errand, that soft summer evening, at the very moment when Marie was feeling lifted up by the light of joy in the children’s faces, and was telling herself how good it was that she had come this way.  Hearing the sound of the fiddle, De Arthenay stopped for a moment, and his face grew dark as night.  He was a religious man, as sternly so as his Huguenot ancestor, but wearing his religion with a difference.  He knew all music, except psalm-tunes, to be directly from the devil.  Even as to the psalm-tunes themselves, it seemed to him a dreadful thing that worship could not be conducted without this compromise with evil, this snare to catch the ear; and he harboured in the depth of his soul thoughts about the probable frivolity of David, which he hardly voiced even to himself.  The fiddle, in particular, he held to be positively devilish, both in its origin and influence; those who