"Yes; it would be a serious inconvenience to me," replied Angelique.

"Now that is worth coming here for. De northwest wind, I do not feel it
since you say that."

"I was thinking before you came, monsieur, what if I should never see
you again? And if I saw you plainly now I could not talk so much. But
something may happen. It is so strange, and like another world, this
water."

Tante-gra'mere screamed, and Angelique disappeared from the window-sill.
It was not the mere outcry of a frightened woman. The keen small shriek
was so terrible in its helplessness and appeal to Heaven that Captain
Saucier was made limp by it.

"What shall I do?" he asked his family.

"I cannot force her into the boat when she cries out like that."

"Perhaps she will go at dawn," suggested Angelique. "The wind may sink.
The howling and the darkness terrify her more than the water."

"But Colonel Menard cannot wait until dawn. We shall all be drowned here
before she will budge," lamented Madame Saucier.

"Leave her with me," urged Peggy Morrison, "and the rest of you go with
Colonel Menard. I'll manage her. She will be ready to jump out of the
window into the next boat that comes along."

"We cannot leave her, Peggy, and we cannot leave you. I am responsible
to your father for your safety. I will put you and my family into the
boat, and stay with her myself."

"Angelique will not leave me!" cried the little voice among the screens.

"Are you ready to lower them?" called Colonel Menard.

Captain Saucier went again to the window, his wife and daughter and
Peggy with him.

"I could not leave her," said Angelique to Peggy. They stood behind the
father and mother, who told their trouble across the sill.

"That spoiled old woman needs a good shaking," declared Peggy.

"Poor little tante-gra'mere. It is a dreadful thing, Peggy, to be a
child when you are too old for discipline."

"Give my compliments to madame, and coax her," urged Colonel Menard.
"Tell her, if she will let herself be lowered to me, I will pledge my
life for her safety."

The two children stood huddled together, waiting, large-eyed and silent,
while their elders kneeled around the immovable invalid. Peggy laughed
at the expectant attitudes of the pleaders.

"Tante-gra'mere has now quite made up her mind to go," Madame Saucier
announced over and over to her family and to Peggy, and to the slaves at
the partition door, all of whom were waiting for the rescue barre