n's face, and his open mouth was gasping--

"Mister Tarbox!"

"Claude St. Pierre, after six years, I'm glad to see you.--Madame,
take good care of Claude.--No fear but she will, my boy; if anybody
in Louisiana knows how to take care of a traveller, it's Madame
Beausoleil." He smiled for all. The daughter's large black eyes
danced, but the mother asked Claude, with unmoved countenance and soft
tone:

"You are Claude St. Pierre?--from Gran' Point'?"

"Yass."

"Dass lately since you left yondah?"

"About two month'."

"Bonaventure Deschamps--he was well?"

"Yass." Claude's eyes were full of a glad surprise, and asked a
question that his lips did not dare to venture upon. Madame Beausoleil
read it, and she said:

"We was raise' together, Bonaventure and me." She waved her hand
toward her daughter. "He teach her to read. Seet down to the fire; we
make you some sopper."

CHAPTER IV.

MARGUERITE.

Out in the kitchen, while the coffee was dripping and the ham and eggs
frying, the mother was very silent, and the daughter said little, but
followed her now and then with furtive liftings of her young black
eyes. Marguerite remembered Bonaventure Deschamps well and lovingly.
For years she had seen the letters that at long intervals came from
him at Grande Pointe to her mother here. In almost every one of them
she had read high praises of Claude. He had grown, thus, to be the
hero of her imagination. She had wondered if it could ever happen that
he would come within her sight, and if so, when, where, how. And now,
here at a time of all times when it would have seemed least possible,
he had, as it were, rained down.

She wondered to-night, with more definiteness of thought than ever
before, what were the deep feelings which her reticent little
mother--Marguerite was an inch the taller--kept hid in that dear
breast. Rarely had emotion moved it. She remembered its terrible
heavings at the time of her father's death, and the later silent
downpour of tears when her only sister and brother were taken in one
day. Since then, those eyes had rarely been wet; yet more than once or
twice she had seen tears in them when they were reading a letter from
Grande Pointe. Had her mother ever had something more than a sister's
love for Bonaventure? Had Bonaventure loved her? And when? Before her
marriage, or after her widowhood?

The only answer that came to her as she now stood, knife in hand, by
the griddle, was a roar of