His interests had become so contracted that the entrance of a stranger in the church was for him a great event.  One day two ladies came in; one was old, the other young—­a mother and daughter probably.  Behind them came a man who was following them.  He bowed to them as they came out, and after offering them some holy water, he took the arm of the elder lady.

“That must be the fiance of the younger one,” thought the wheelwright.  And until evening he kept trying to recall where he had formerly seen a young man who resembled this one.  But the one he was thinking of must be an old man by this time, for it seemed as if he had known him down home in his youth.

The same man frequently came again to walk home with the ladies, and this vague, distant, familiar resemblance which he could not place worried the old man so much that he made his wife come with him to see if she could help his impaired memory.

One evening as it was growing dusk the three strangers entered together.  When they had passed the old man said: 

“Well, do you know him?”

His wife anxiously tried to ransack her memory.  Suddenly she said in a low tone: 

“Yes—­yes—­but he is darker, taller, stouter and is dressed like a gentleman, but, father, all the same, it is your face when you were young!”

The old man started violently.

It was true.  He looked like himself and also like his brother who was dead, and like his father, whom he remembered while he was yet young.  The old couple were so affected that they could not speak.  The three persons came out and were about to leave the church.

The man touched his finger to the holy water sprinkler.  Then the old man, whose hand was trembling so that he was fairly sprinkling the ground with holy water, exclaimed: 

“Jean!”

The young man stopped and looked at him.

He repeated in a lower tone: 

“Jean!”

The two women looked at them without understanding.

He then said for the third time, sobbing as he did so: 

“Jean!”

The man stooped down, with his face close to the old man’s, and as a memory of his childhood dawned on him he replied: 

“Papa Pierre, Mamma Jeanne!”

He had forgotten everything, his father’s surname and the name of his native place, but he always remembered those two words that he had so often repeated:  “Papa Pierre, Mamma Jeanne.”

He sank to the floor, his face on the old man’s knees, and he wept, kissing now his father and then his mother, while they were almost breathless from intense joy.

The two ladies also wept, understanding as they did that some great happiness had come to pass.