ll call on her now, though, after--Well, why shouldn't I
have told him what every one is talking about? Why not, indeed?"

A toss of the head dismissed the matter and any doubts pertaining
thereto, while her thoughts flew from past to present, as a fortress
on a car, its occupants armed with pellets of festival conflict, drove
by amid peals of laughter. Absorbed in this scene of merriment, Susan
forgot her haste, and kept her apostolic half waiting at the
rendezvous with the patience of a Jacob tarrying for a Rachel. But
when she did finally appear, with hat not perfectly poised, her hair
in a pretty disarray, she looked so waywardly charming, he forgave her
on the spot, and the lamb led the stern shepherd with a crook from
Eve's apple tree.

"As thin as a lath and gaunt as a ghost!" repeated Saint-Prosper, as
the fair penitent vanished in a whirl of gaiety. "Susan always was
frank."

Smiling somewhat bitterly, he paused long enough to light a cigar, but
it went out in his fingers as he strolled mechanically toward the
wharves, through the gardens of a familiar square, where the wheezing
of the distant steamers and the echoes of the cathedral clock marked
the hours of pleasure or pain to-day as it had tolled them off
yesterday. Beyond the pale of the orange trees with their golden
wealth, the drays were rumbling in the streets and there were the same
signs of busy traffic--for the carnival had not yet become a legal
holiday--that he had observed when the strollers had reached the city
and made their way to the St. Charles. He saw her anew, pale and
thoughtful, leaning on the rail of the steamer looking toward the
city, where events, undreamed of, were to follow thick and fast. He
saw her, a slender figure, earnest, self-possessed, enter the city
gates, unheralded, unknown. He saw her as he had known her in the
wilderness--not as fancy might now depict her, the daughter of a
marquis--a strolling player, and as such he loved best to think of
her.

Arising out of his physical weakness and the period of inaction
following the treaty of peace, he experienced a sudden homesickness
for his native land; a desire to re-visit familiar scenes, to breathe
the sweet air of the country, where his boyhood had been passed, to
listen to the thunder of the boulevards, to watch the endless,
sad-joyful processions.

Not far distant from the blossoming, redolent square was the office of
the Trans-Atlantic Steamship Company, where a c