d
Agricola had done so. The rest of the company, save a few male figures
down in the garden, after some feeble efforts to keep up their spirits
on the veranda, remarked the growing coolness or the waning daylight,
and singly or in pairs withdrew. It was not long before Raoul, who had
come up upon the veranda, was left alone. He seemed to wait for
something, as, leaning over the rail while the stars came out, he sang
to himself, in a soft undertone, a snatch of a Creole song:

"La pluie--la pluie tombait,
Crapaud criait,
Moustique chantait--"

The moon shone so brightly that the children in the garden did not break
off their hide-and-seek, and now and then Raoul suspended the murmur of
his song, absorbed in the fate of some little elf gliding from one black
shadow to crouch in another. He was himself in the deep shade of a
magnolia, over whose outer boughs the moonlight was trickling, as if the
whole tree had been dipped in quicksilver.

In the broad walk running down to the garden gate some six or seven dark
forms sat in chairs, not too far away for the light of their cigars to
be occasionally seen and their voices to reach his ear; but he did not
listen. In a little while there came a light footstep, and a soft,
mock-startled "Who is that?" and one of that same sparkling group of
girls that had lately hung upon Honore came so close to Raoul, in her
attempt to discern his lineaments, that their lips accidentally met.
They had but a moment of hand-in-hand converse before they were hustled
forth by a feminine scouting party and thrust along into one of the
great rooms of the house, where the youth and beauty of the Grandissimes
were gathered in an expansive semicircle around a languishing fire,
waiting to hear a story, or a song, or both, or half a dozen of each,
from that master of narrative and melody, Raoul Innerarity.

"But mark," they cried unitedly, "you have got to wind up with the story
of Bras-Coupe!"

"A song! A song!"

"_Une chanson Creole! Une chanson des negres!_"

"Sing 'ye tole dance la doung y doung doung!'" cried a black-eyed girl.

Raoul explained that it had too many objectionable phrases.

"Oh, just hum the objectionable phrases and go right on."

But instead he sang them this:

"_La premier' fois mo te 'oir li,
Li te pose au bord so lit;
Mo di', Bouzon, bel n'amourese!
L'aut' fois li te si' so la saise
Comme vie Madam dans so fauteil,
Quand