d
garden from pasture, and showed still a great crown of leaves blanched
by the frosts, and shivering in the wind. An artemisia, with blackened
stalks, nodded its draggled yellow blossoms at one angle of the house,
while a little company of barn-door fowls stood closely grouped under
the southern lea, with heads close drawn upon their breasts, idling and
winking in the sunshine.

The young mother of the vagrant little one who had attracted latterly so
much of the solitary woman's regard received them with an awkward
welcome.

"Miss Arles is poorly, to-day," she said, "and she's flighty. She keeps
Arthur" (the child) "with her. You hear how she's a-chatterin' now."
(The door of her chamber stood half open.) "Arty seems to understand
her. I'm sure I don't."

Nor, indeed, did the Doctor, to whose ear a torrent of rapid French
speech was like the gibberish of demons. He never doubted 't was full of
wickedness. Not so Adele. There were sweet sounds to her ear in that
swift flow of Provencal speech,--tender, endearing epithets, that seemed
like the echo of music heard long ago,--pleasant banter of words that
had the rhythm of the old godmother's talk.

"Ah, you're a gay one! Now--put on your velvet cap--so. We'll find a
bride for you some day--some day, when you're a tall, proud man. Who's
your father, Arty? Pah! it's nothing. You'll make somebody's heart ache
all the same,--eh, Arty, boy?"

"Do you understand her, Miss Maverick?" says the mother.

"Not wholly," said Adele; and the two visitors stepped in noiselessly.

The child, bedizened with finery, was standing upon the bed where the
sick woman lay, with a long feather from the cock's tail waving from his
cap. Madame Arles, with the hot flush of the fever upon her,
looked--saving the thinness--as she might have looked twenty years
before. And as her flashing eye caught the newcomers, her voice broke
out wildly again,--

"Here's the bride, and here's the priest! Where's the groom? Where's the
groom? Where's the groom, I say?"

The violence of her manner made poor Adele shiver.

The boy laughed as he saw it, and said,--

"She's afraid! _I'm_ not afraid."

"Oh, no!" said the crazed woman, turning on him. "You're a man, Arty:
men are not afraid,--you wanton, you wild one! Where's the groom?" said
she again, addressing the Doctor, fiercely.

"My good woman," says the old gentleman, "we have come to offer you the
consolations that are only to be found in the Go