ion? I shall not even tell you, he is such a bad boy. Do
you not know that all the _noblesse_, and all the _savants_, and
especially all the archbishops and cardinals,--all, in a word, but such
silly little chicks as yourself,--have found out that this religious
business is a joke? Actually a joke, every whit; except, to be sure,
this heresy phase; that is a joke they cannot take. Now, I wish you
well, pretty child; so if you--eh?--truly, my pet, I fear we shall have
to call you unreasonable. Stop; they can spare me here a moment; I will
take you to the Marquise: she is in the next room.... Behold," said he,
as he entered the presence of his marchioness, "the little maid who will
not marry!"

The Marquise was as cold and hard-hearted as the Marquis was loose and
kind; but we need not recount the slow tortures of the _fille a la
cassette's_ second verbal temptation. The colony had to have soldiers,
she was given to understand, and the soldiers must have wives. "Why, I
am a soldier's wife, myself!" said the gorgeously attired lady, laying
her hand upon the governor-general's epaulet. She explained, further,
that he was rather softhearted, while she was a business woman; also
that the royal commissary's rolls did not comprehend such a thing as a
spinster, and--incidentally--that living by principle was rather out of
fashion in the province just then.

After she had offered much torment of this sort, a definite notion
seemed to take her; she turned her lord by a touch of the elbow, and
exchanged two or three business-like whispers with him at a window
overlooking the Levee.

"Fillette," she said, returning, "you are going to live on the
sea-coast. I am sending an aged lady there to gather the wax of the wild
myrtle. This good soldier of mine buys it for our king at twelve livres
the pound. Do you not know that women can make money? The place is not
safe; but there are no safe places in Louisiana. There are no nuns to
trouble you there; only a few Indians and soldiers. You and Madame will
live together, quite to yourselves, and can pray as you like."

"And not marry a soldier," said the Grand Marquis.

"No," said the lady, "not if you can gather enough myrtle-berries to
afford me a profit and you a living."

It was some thirty leagues or more eastward to the country of the
Biloxis, a beautiful land of low, evergreen hills looking out across the
pine-covered sand-keys of Mississippi Sound to the Gulf of Mexico. The
nor