seemed to
hold all of its sterner and fiercer traits in abeyance while he
domiciled himself absolutely within his narrow and monotonous
environment. Since the dance at the river house a new content, like a
soft and diffused sweetness, had crept through his blood with a vague,
tingling sense of joy.

He began to like walking about rather aimlessly in the town's narrow
streets, with the mud-daubed cabins on either hand. This simple life
under low, thatched roofs had a charm. When a door was opened he could
see a fire of logs on the ample hearth shooting its yellow tongues up
the sooty chimney-throat. Soft creole voices murmured and sang, or
jangled their petty domestic discords. Women in scant petticoats,
leggings and moccasins swept snow from the squat verandas, or fed the
pigs in little sties behind the cabins. Everybody cried cheerily: "Bon
jour, Monsieur, comment allez-vous?" as he went by, always accompanying
the verbal salute with a graceful wave of the hand.

When he walked early in the morning a waft of broiling game and
browning corn scones was abroad. Pots and kettles occupied the hearths
with glowing coals heaped around and under. Shaggy dogs whined at the
doors until the mensal remnants were tossed out to them in the front
yard.

But it was always a glimpse of Alice that must count for everything in
Beverley's reckonings, albeit he would have strenuously denied it. True
he went to Roussillon place almost every day, it being a fixed part of
his well ordered habit, and had a talk with her. Sometimes, when Dame
Roussillon was very busy and so quite off her guard, they read together
in a novel, or in certain parts of the odd volume of Montaigne. This
was done more for the sweetness of disobedience than to enjoy the
already familiar pages.

Now and again they repeated their fencing bout; but never with the
result which followed the first. Beverley soon mastered Alice's tricks
and showed her that, after all, masculine muscle is not to be
discounted at its own game by even the most wonderful womanly strength
and suppleness. She struggled bravely to hold her vantage ground once
gained so easily, but the inevitable was not to be avoided. At last,
one howling winter day, he disarmed her by the very trick that she had
shown him. That ended the play and they ran shivering into the house.

"Ah," she cried, "it isn't fair. You are so much bigger than I; you
have so much longer arms; so much more weight and power. It