The Tremendous Event Part 36

"Then, Isabel, you doubt me?"

She took both his hands and said:

"Simon, it sometimes makes me rather sad to think that in this great adventure it was not I but another who was your companion in danger, the one whom you defended and who protected you."

He shook his head:

"No, Isabel, I never had but one companion, you, Isabel, and you alone. You were my only aim and my only thought, my one hope and my one desire."

After a moment's reflection, she said:

"I talked of her a good deal with Antonio, on the way home. Do you know, Simon, that girl is not only very beautiful, but capable of the n.o.blest, loftiest feelings? I know nothing of her past; according to Antonio, it had its unsettled moments. But since then . . . since then . . . in spite of her present mode of life, in spite of all the admiration which she attracts, she leads an existence apart. You alone have really stirred her feelings. For you, from what I can see for myself and from what Antonio told me--and he, after all, is only a rejected and embittered lover--for you Dolores would have laid down her life and that from the first day. Did you know that, Simon?"

He was silent.

"You are right," she said. "You can't answer. However, there is one point, Simon, on which I ask you to tell me the absolute truth. I can look you straight in the face, can I not? There is not in the depths of your being a single memory that comes between us? . . . Not a weakness? . . . Not a disloyal thought?"

He pressed her to him and, with his lips on hers, said:

"There's you, Isabel, and you alone: you in the past and you in the future."

"I believe you, Simon," she declared.

The wedding took place a month later; and they went to live in the wreck of the _Ville de Dunkerque_, the official residence of the French high commissioner of the new territories.

It was here that the draft agreement was signed, in accordance with Simon Dubosc's proposal and his preliminary investigations, for the great ca.n.a.l which was to bisect the Isthmus of Normandy, allotting to each country, right and left, an almost equal portion of land.

Here too was signed the solemn covenant by which Great Britain and France declared eternal friends.h.i.+p and laid the foundations of the United States of Europe.

And it was here that four children were born to Isabel and Simon.

In after years, Simon often went on horseback or by aeroplane, accompanied by his wife, to visit his friend Edward Rolleston. When he had recovered from his wounds, Rolleston set to work and became the manager of a large fis.h.i.+ng-industry on the new English coast, in which he employed Antonio. Rolleston married. The Indian lived alone for a long time, waiting for her who never came and of whom no one ever spoke. But one day he received a letter and went away. Some months later, he wrote from Mexico announcing his marriage to Dolores.

But Isabel and Simon's favourite walk led them to Old Sandstone's house. He lived in a little bungalow, close to the prehistoric dwelling by the lake, where he pursued his researches into the new land. The showers of gold, now exhausted, no longer interested him; moreover, the problem had been solved. But what an indecipherable riddle was this building, standing on a site of the Eocene period!

"There were apes in those days," Old Sandstone declared. "There's no doubt of that. But men! And men capable of building, of ornamenting their dwellings of carving stone! No, I confess this is a phenomenon which unsettles all one's ideas. What do you make of it, Simon?"

Simon made no reply. A boat was rocking on the lake. He took his place in it with Isabel and rowed with a care-free mind; nor did Dolores'

image ever rise from this limpid water, in which she had bathed on a certain voluptuous evening. Simon was the husband of one alone and this was the woman whom he had won.

THE END