you tried to look into his eyes? You can't do it. He won't let
you. He's got something in there that he doesn't want you to see."

In the middle of the afternoon, when Achille's skiff was already
re-entering the shades of the swamp on his way homeward, and his two
landed passengers stood on the levee at the head of Harvey's Canal
with the Mississippi rolling by their feet and on its farther side the
masts and spires of the city, lighted by the western sun, swinging
round the long bend of her yellow harbor, Mr. Tarbox offered his hand
to say good-by. The surveyor playfully held it.

"I mean no disparagement to your present calling," he said, "but the
next time we meet I hope you'll be a contractor."

"Ah!" responded Tarbox, "it's not my nature. I cannot contract; I
must always expand. And yet--I thank you.

"'Pure thoughts are angel visitors. Be such
The frequent inmates of thy guileless breast.'

"Good luck! Good-by!"

One took the ferry; the other, the west bound train at Gretna.

CHAPTER IX.

NOT BLUE EYES, NOR YELLOW HAIR.

When the St. Pierres found themselves really left with only each
other's faces to look into, and the unbounded world around them, it
was the father who first spoke:

"Well, Claude, where you t'ink 'better go?"

There had been a long, silent struggle in both men's minds. And now
Claude heard with joy this question asked in English. To ask it in
their old Acadian tongue would have meant retreat; this meant advance.
And yet he knew his father yearned for Bayou des Acadiens. Nay, not
his father; only one large part of his father's nature; the old,
French, home-loving part.

What should Claude answer? Grande Pointe? Even for St. Pierre alone
that was impossible. "Can a man enter a second time into his mother's
womb?" No; the thatched cabin stood there,--stands there now; but, be
he happy or unhappy, no power can ever make St. Pierre small enough
again to go back into that shell. Let it stand, the lair of one of
whom you may have heard, who has retreated straight backward from
Grande Pointe and from advancing enlightenment and order,--the village
drunkard, Chat-oue.

Claude's trouble, then, was not that his father's happiness beckoned
in one direction and his in another; but that his father's was linked
on behind his. Could the father endure the atmosphere demanded by the
son's widening power? Could the second nature of lifetime habits bear
the change? Of his higher spi