tant, and nodded. In a
twinkling he was at her side. She glanced at him again and said quite
contentedly:

"Yass; _'tis_ so," and they went the short remnant of the way
together.

CHAPTER XII.

THE BEAUSOLEILS AND ST. PIERRES.

You think of going to New Orleans in the spring. Certainly, the spring
is the time to go. When you find yourself there go some day for
luncheon--if they haven't moved it, there is talk of that,--go to the
Christian Women's Exchange, already mentioned, in the Rue
Bourbon,--French Quarter. You step immediately from the sidewalk into
the former drawing-room of a house built early in the century as a
fashionable residence. That at least is its aspect. Notice, for
instance, in the back parlor, crowded now, like the front one, with
eating-tables, a really interesting old wooden mantelpiece. Of course
this is not the way persons used to go in old times. They entered by
the porte-cochere and open carriage-way upon which these drawing-rooms
still open by several glass doors on your right. Step out there. You
find a veranda crowded with neat white-clothed tables. Before some
late alterations there was a great trellis full of green sunshine and
broken breezes entangled among vines of trumpet-creeper and the
Scuppernong grape. Here you will be waited on, by small,
blue-calico-robed damsels of Methodist unsophistication and
Presbyterian propriety, to excellent refreshment; only, if you know
your soul's true interest, eschew their fresh bread and insist on
having yesterday's.

However, that is a matter of taste there, and no matter at all here.
All I need to add is that there are good apartments overhead to be
rented to women too good for this world, and that in the latter end of
April, 1884, Zosephine and Marguerite Beausoleil here made their home.

The tavern was sold. The old life was left far behind. They had done
that dreadful thing that everybody deprecates and everybody likes to
do--left the country and come to live in the city. And Zosephine was
well pleased. A man who had tried and failed to be a merchant in the
city, he and his wife, took the tavern; so Zosephine had not reduced
the rural population--had not sinned against "stastistics."

Besides, she had the good conscience of having fled from Mr.
Tarbox--put U. and I. apart, as it were--and yet without being so hid
but a suitor's proper persistency could find her. Just now he was far
away prosecuting the commercial interests of Cl