ed, unimpassioned speech of Honore, sounding
so loftily beautiful in the ear of Aurora that when Clotilde looked at
her, sitting motionless with her rapt eyes lifted up, those eyes came
down to her own with a sparkle of enthusiasm, and she softly said:

"It sounds like St. Gabriel!" and then blushed.

Clotilde answered with a happy, meaning look, which intensified the
blush, and then leaning affectionately forward and holding the maman's
eyes with her own, she said:

"You have my consent."

"Saucy!" said Aurora. "Wait till I get my own."

Some of his kinsmen Honore pacified; some he silenced. He invited all to
withdraw their lands and moneys from his charge, and some accepted the
invitation. They spurned his parting advice to sell, and the policy they
then adopted, and never afterward modified, was that "all or nothing"
attitude which, as years rolled by, bled them to penury in those famous
cupping-leeching-and-bleeding establishments, the courts of Louisiana.
You may see their grandchildren, to-day, anywhere within the angle of
the old rues Esplanade and Rampart, holding up their heads in
unspeakable poverty, their nobility kept green by unflinching
self-respect, and their poetic and pathetic pride revelling in
ancestral, perennial rebellion against common sense.

"That is Agricola," whispered Aurora, with lifted head and eyes dilated
and askance, as one deep-chested voice roared above all others.

Agricola stormed.

"Uncle," Aurora by and by heard Honore say, "shall I leave my own
counting-room?"

At that moment Joseph Frowenfeld entered, pausing with one hand on the
outer rail. No one noticed him but Honore, who was watching for him, and
who, by a silent motion, directed him into the private office.

"H-whe shake its dust from our feet!" said Agricola, gathering some
young retainers by a sweep of his glance and going out down the stair in
the arched way, unmoved by the fragrance of warm bread. On the banquette
he harangued his followers.

He said that in such times as these every lover of liberty should go
armed; that the age of trickery had come; that by trickery Louisianians
had been sold, like cattle, to a nation of parvenues, to be dragged
before juries for asserting the human right of free trade or ridding the
earth of sneaks in the pay of the government; that laws, so-called, had
been forged into thumbscrews, and a Congress which had bound itself to
give them all the rights of American citizens--so