from high Latin
ancestry on the one side and--we might venture--Jaloff African on the
other. To these charms of person she added mental acuteness,
conversational adroitness, concealed cunning, and noiseless but visible
strength of will; and to these, that rarest of gifts in one of her
tincture, the purity of true womanhood.

At fourteen a necessity which had been parleyed with for two years or
more became imperative, and Aurore's maid was taken from her.
Explanation is almost superfluous. Aurore was to become a lady and her
playmate a lady's maid; but not _her_ maid, because the maid had become,
of the two, the ruling spirit. It was a question of grave debate in the
mind of M. De Grapion what disposition to make of her.

About this time the Grandissimes and De Grapions, through certain
efforts of Honore's father (since dead) were making some feeble
pretences of mutual good feeling, and one of those Kentuckian dealers in
corn and tobacco whose flatboat fleets were always drifting down the
Mississippi, becoming one day M. De Grapion's transient guest,
accidentally mentioned a wish of Agricola Fusilier. Agricola, it
appeared, had commissioned him to buy the most beautiful lady's maid
that in his extended journeyings he might be able to find; he wanted to
make her a gift to his niece, Honore's sister. The Kentuckian saw the
demand met in Aurore's playmate. M. De Grapion would not sell her.
(Trade with a Grandissime? Let them suspect he needed money?) No; but he
would ask Agricola to accept the services of the waiting-maid for, say,
ten years. The Kentuckian accepted the proposition on the spot and it
was by and by carried out. She was never recalled to the Cannes Brulees,
but in subsequent years received her freedom from her master, and in New
Orleans became Palmyre la Philosophe, as they say in the corrupt French
of the old Creoles, or Palmyre Philosophe, noted for her taste and skill
as a hair-dresser, for the efficiency of her spells and the sagacity of
her divinations, but most of all for the chaste austerity with which she
practised the less baleful rites of the voudous.

"That's the woman," said Doctor Keene, rising to go, as he concluded
the narrative,--"that's she, Palmyre Philosophe. Now you get a view of
the vastness of Agricole's generosity; he tolerates her even though she
does not present herself in the 'strictly menial capacity.' Reason
why--_he's afraid of her_."

Time passed, if that may be called time