o years longer; but this response came only after the old
master and his pretty, stricken Aurora had wept over it until they were
weak and gentle,--and was not a response either, but only a
silent consent.

Shortly before the return of Honore--and here it was that Aurora took up
again the thread of her account--while his mother, long-widowed, reigned
in the paternal mansion, with Agricola for her manager, Bras-Coupe
appeared. From that advent, and the long and varied mental sufferings
which its consequences brought upon her, sprang that second change in
Palmyre, which made her finally untamable, and ended in a manumission,
granted her more for fear than for conscience' sake. When Aurora
attempted to tell those experiences, even leaving Bras-Coupe as much as
might be out of the recital, she choked with tears at the very start,
stopped, laughed, and said:

"_C'est tout_--daz all. 'Sieur Frowenfel', oo you fine dad pigtu' to
loog lag, yonnah, hon de wall?"

She spoke as if he might have overlooked it, though twenty times, at
least, in the last hour, she had seen him glance at it.

"It is a good likeness," said the apothecary, turning to Clotilde, yet
showing himself somewhat puzzled in the matter of the costume.

The ladies laughed.

"Daz ma grade-gran'-mamma," said Clotilde.

"Dass one _fille a la cassette_," said Aurora, "my gran'-muzzah; _mais_,
ad de sem tarn id is Clotilde." She touched her daughter under the chin
with a ringed finger. "Clotilde is my gran'-mamma."

Frowenfeld rose to go.

"You muz come again, 'Sieur Frowenfel'," said both ladies, in a breath.

What could he say?

CHAPTER XXVI

A RIDE AND A RESCUE

"Douane or Bienville?"

Such was the choice presented by Honore Grandissime to Joseph
Frowenfeld, as the former on a lively brown colt and the apothecary on a
nervy chestnut fell into a gentle, preliminary trot while yet in the
rue Royale, looked after by that great admirer of both, Raoul
Innerarity.

"Douane?" said Frowenfeld. (It was the street we call Custom-house.)

"It has mud-holes," objected Honore.

"Well, then, the rue du Canal?"

"The canal--I can smell it from here. Why not rue Bienville?"

Frowenfeld said he did not know. (We give the statement for what it is
worth.)

Notice their route. A spirit of perversity seems to have entered into
the very topography of this quarter. They turned up the rue Bienville
(up is toward the river); reaching the levee, they took