atter of so great importance"--

Madame's little brown aunt gave a faint cough from a dim corner of the
room.

"'Tis a beautiful night," she remarked, and stepped out on the balcony.

Then the General asked his question. It was a very long question, or,
maybe, repeated twice or thrice; for it was fully ten minutes before he
moved out of the room, saying good-evening.

Ah! old General Villivicencio. The most martial-looking man in
Louisiana! But what would the people, the people who cheered in the
morning, have said, to see the fair Queen Delicieuse at the top of the
stair, sweetly bowing you down into the starlight,--humbled,
crestfallen, rejected!

The campaign opened. The Villivicencio ticket was read in French and
English with the very different sentiments already noted. In the
Exchange, about the courts, among the "banks," there was lively talking
concerning its intrinsic excellence and extrinsic chances. The young
gentlemen who stood about the doors of the so-called "coffee-houses"
talked with a frantic energy alarming to any stranger, and just when you
would have expected to see them jump and bite large mouthfuls out of
each other's face, they would turn and enter the door, talking on in the
same furious manner, and, walking up to the bar, click their glasses to
the success of the Villivicencio ticket. Sundry swarthy and wrinkled
remnants of an earlier generation were still more enthusiastic. There
was to be a happy renaissance; a purging out of Yankee ideas; a blessed
home-coming of those good old Bourbon morals and manners which Yankee
notions had expatriated. In the cheerfulness of their anticipations they
even went the length of throwing their feet high in air, thus indicating
how the Villivicencio ticket was going to give "doze Americains" the
kick under the nose.

In the three or four weeks which followed, the General gathered a
surfeit of adulation, notwithstanding which he was constantly and with
pain imagining a confused chatter of ladies, and when he shut his eyes
with annoyance, there was Madame Delicieuse standing, and saying, "I
knew not a reason why you should be angry against your son," gazing in
his face with hardened simplicity, and then--that last scene on the
stairs wherein he seemed still to be descending, down, down.

Madame herself was keeping good her resolution.

"Now or never," she said, "a reconciliation or a quarrel."

When the General, to keep up appearances, called again, she