ish; and I always will, as long as you live. I will go to the
convent to-day. You can send for me at any time when you want me, you
know. I am sure the abbess will let me come whenever you send Pierre
for me."

"Well, well--do not be in such a hurry. I do not want you to go to-day.
Why should you be in such a hurry?"

When the breeze had come to refresh him, and he had had his coffee,
Monsieur Revel felt more complaisant, and explained what he meant by
there being no hurry. Euphrosyne should not leave him till to-morrow;
and this day should be spent as she pleased. Whatever she liked to ask
to-day should be granted. This indulgence was promised under a
tolerable certainty that she would ask nothing unreasonable: that she
would not propose a dinner-party of dark-complexioned guests, for
instance. There might also be an expectation of what it would be that
she would choose. M. Revel was conscious that he did not visit his
estate of Le Bosquet, in the plain of Limbe, so often as Euphrosyne
would have liked, or as he himself knew to be good for his agent, the
cultivators, and his heiress. He was aware that if he could have shown
any satisfaction in the present order of affairs, any good-will towards
the working of the new system, there might have been a chance of old
stories dying away--of old grievances being forgotten by the
cultivators, in his present acquiescence in their freedom. He could not
order the carriage, and say he was going to Le Bosquet; but he had just
courage enough to set Euphrosyne free to ask to go. It turned out
exactly as he expected.

"We will do what you will, my child, to-day. I feel strong enough to be
your humble servant."

"It is a splendid day, grandpapa. It must be charming at Le Bosquet.
If I order the carriage now, we can get there before the heat; and we
need not come home till the cool of the evening. We will fill the
carriage with fruit and flowers for the abbess. May I order the
carriage?"

Le Bosquet was only twelve miles off. They arrived when the cultivators
were settling to their work after breakfast. It was now, as on every
former occasion, a perplexity, an embarrassment to Euphrosyne, that the
negroes lost all their gaiety, and most of their civility, in the
presence of her grandfather. She could hardly wonder, when she
witnessed this, at his intolerance of the very mention of the blacks, at
his ridicule of all that she ever told him about them, from her ow