e a bride dared enter a house so
nearly new, it had been deemed necessary for him to come and, before a
temporary altar within the dwelling, to say mass in the time of full
moon. But not yet was the house really a dwelling; it, and all
Carancro, were waiting for the wedding. Make haste, Bonaventure!

He had left the Teche behind him on the east. And now a day breaks
whose sunset finds him beyond the Vermilion River. He cannot go aside
to the ex-governor's, over yonder on the right. He is making haste.
This day his journey will end. His heart is light; he has thought out
the whole matter now; he makes no doubt any longer that the story told
him is true. And he knows now just what to do: this very sunset he
will reach his goal; he goes to fill 'Thanase's voided place; to lay
his own filial service at the feet of the widowed mother; to be a
brother in the lost brother's place; and Zosephine?--why, she shall be
her daughter, the same as though 'Thanase, not he, had won her. And
thus, too, Zosephine shall have her own sweet preference--that
preference which she had so often whispered to him--for a scholar
rather than a soldier. Such is the plan, and Conscience has given her
consent.

The sun soars far overhead. It, too, makes haste. But the wasted,
flushed, hungry-eyed traveller is putting the miles behind him. He
questions none to-day that pass him or whom he overtakes; only bows,
wipes his warm brow, and presses on across the prairie. Straight
before him, though still far away, a small, white, wooden steeple
rises from out a tuft of trees. It is _la chapelle_!

The distance gets less and less. See! the afternoon sunlight strikes
the roofs of a few unpainted cottages that have begun to show
themselves at right and left of the chapel. And now he sees the green
window-shutters of such as are not without them, and their copperas or
indigo-dyed curtains blowing in and out. Nearer; nearer; here is a
house, and yonder another, newly built. Carancro is reached.

He enters a turfy, cattle-haunted lane between rose-hedges. In a
garden on one side, and presently in another over the way, children
whom he remembers--but grown like weeds since he saw them last--are at
play; but when they stop and gaze at him, it is without a sign of
recognition. Now he walks down the village street. How empty it seems!
was it really always so? Still, yonder is a man he knows--and yonder a
woman--but they disappear without seeing him.

How familiar