ale
aristocracy in everything save the ecclesiastical desk,--were there.
Tickets were high-priced to insure the exclusion of the vulgar. No
distinguished stranger was allowed to miss them. They were beautiful!
They were clad in silken extenuations from the throat to the feet, and
wore, withal, a pathos in their charm that gave them a family likeness
to innocence.

Madame Delphine, were you not a stranger, could have told you all about
it; though hardly, I suppose, without tears.

But at the time of which we would speak (1821-22) her day of splendor
was set, and her husband--let us call him so for her sake--was long
dead. He was an American, and, if we take her word for it, a man of
noble heart and extremely handsome; but this is knowledge which we can
do without.

Even in those days the house was always shut, and Madame Delphine's
chief occupation and end in life seemed to be to keep well locked up
in-doors. She was an excellent person, the neighbors said,--a very
worthy person; and they were, may be, nearer correct than they knew.
They rarely saw her save when she went to or returned from church; a
small, rather tired-looking, dark quadroone of very good features and a
gentle thoughtfulness of expression which it would take long to
describe: call it a widow's look.

In speaking of Madame Delphine's house, mention should have been made of
a gate in the fence on the Royal-street sidewalk. It is gone now, and
was out of use then, being fastened once for all by an iron staple
clasping the cross-bar and driven into the post.

Which leads us to speak of another person.

CHAPTER III.

CAPITAINE LEMAITRE.

He was one of those men that might be any age,--thirty, forty,
forty-five; there was no telling from his face what was years and what
was only weather. His countenance was of a grave and quiet, but also
luminous, sort, which was instantly admired and ever afterward
remembered, as was also the fineness of his hair and the blueness of his
eyes. Those pronounced him youngest who scrutinized his face the
closest. But waiving the discussion of age, he was odd, though not with
the oddness that he who reared him had striven to produce.

He had not been brought up by mother or father. He had lost both in
infancy, and had fallen to the care of a rugged old military grandpa of
the colonial school, whose unceasing endeavor had been to make "his
boy" as savage and ferocious a holder of unimpeachable social rank as it