on. Behind him came
St. Pierre and Sidonie. Then followed Claude and Marguerite; and,
behind all, Zosephine and Tarbox.

They had come, they explained to us, from a funeral at the head of the
canal. They did not say the funeral of a friend, and yet I could see
that every one of them, even the preacher, had shed tears. The others
had thought it best and pleasantest to accompany the minister thus far
towards his home, then take a turn in the gardens, and then take the
horse-cars for the city's centre. Bonaventure and Sidonie were to
return next day by steamer to Belle Alliance and Grande Pointe. The
thoughtful Tarbox had procured Bonaventure's presence at the inquest
of the day before as the identifying witness, thus to save Zosephine
that painful office. And yet it was of Zosephine's own motion, and by
her sad insistence, that she and her daughter followed the outcast to
his grave.

"Yes," she had said, laying one hand in Bonaventure's and the other
in Sidonie's and speaking in the old Acadian tongue, "when I was young
and proud I taught 'Thanase to despise and tease him. I did not know
then that I was such a coward myself. If I had been a better scholar,
Bonaventure, when we used to go to school to the cure together--a
better learner--not in the books merely, but in those things that are
so much better than the things books teach--how different all might
have been! Thank God, Bonaventure, one of us was." She turned to
Sidonie to add,--"But that one was Bonaventure. We will all go"--to
the funeral--"we will all go and bury vain regrets--with the dead."

The influence of the sad office they had just performed was on the
group still, as they paused to give us the words of greeting we
coveted. Yet we could see that a certain sense of being very, very
rich in happiness was on them all, though differently on every one.

Zosephine wore the pear-shaped pearl.

The preacher said good-day, and started down the steps that used to
lead from the levee down across a pretty fountained court and into the
town. But my friend Tarbox--for I must tell you I like to call him my
friend, and like it better every day; we can't all be one sort; you'd
like him if you knew him as I do--my friend Tarbox beckoned me to
detain him.

"Christian!" I called--that is the preacher's real name. He turned
back and met Tarbox just where I stood. They laid their arms across
each other's shoulders in a very Methodist way, and I heard Tarbox
say:

"I