in another, and he was
detained beyond expectation. But a letter said he would come in a day
or two more, and some maps of earlier surveys, drawn by skilled
workmen in great New Orleans, arrived; seeing which, Claude blushed
for his own and fell to work to make them over.

"If at first you not succeed," said Claude,--

"Try--try aga-a-ain," responded Marguerite; "Bonaventure learn me that
poetry; and you?"

"Yass," said Claude. He stood looking down at his work and not seeing
it. What he saw was Grande Pointe in the sunset hour of a spring day
six years gone, the wet, spongy margin of a tiny bayou under his feet,
the great swamp at his back, the leafy undergrowth all around; his
canoe and paddle waiting for him, and Bonaventure repeating to
him--swamp urchin of fourteen--the costliest words of kindness--to
both of them the costliest--that he had ever heard, ending with these
two that Marguerite had spoken. As he resumed his work, he said,
without lifting his eyes:

"Seem' to me 'f I could make myself like any man in dat whole worl', I
radder make myself like Bonaventure. And you?"

She was so slow to answer that he looked at her. Even then she merely
kept on sweeping her fingers slowly and idly back and forth on the
table, and, glancing down upon them, said without enthusiasm: "Yass."

Yet they both loved Bonaventure, each according to knowledge of him.
Nor did their common likings stop with him. The things he had taught
Claude to love and seek suddenly became the admiration of Marguerite.
Aspirations--aspirations!--began to stir and hum in her young heart,
and to pour forth like waking bees in the warm presence of spring.
Claude was a new interpretation of life to her; as one caught abed by
the first sunrise at sea, her whole spirit leaped, with unmeasured
self-reproach, into fresh garments and to a new and beautiful stature,
and looked out upon a wider heaven and earth than ever it had seen or
desired to see before. All at once the life was more than meat and the
body than raiment. Presently she sprang to action. In the convent
school, whose white belfry you could see from the end of Madame
Beausoleil's balcony, whither Zosephine had sent her after teaching
her all she herself knew, it had been "the mind for knowledge;" now it
was "knowledge for the mind." Mental training and enrichment had a
value now, never before dreamed of. The old school-books were got
down, recalled from banishment. Nothing ever had been