es. There was a
bouquet of garden-breaths from gray-green sage and rosemary leaves and
the countless herbs and vegetables which every slaveholding Kaskaskian
cultivated for his large household. Pink and red hollyhocks stood
sentinel along the paths. The slave cabins, the loom-house, the kitchen,
and a row of straw beehives were ranged at the back of the lawn, edging
the garden.

Angelique came back to the main walk, picking her way with slipper toes,
and offered part of her spoil to Rice. He took some roses, and held the
hand which gave them. She had come in his way too soon after his mocking
little talk with young Pierre Menard. He was occupied with other things,
but that had made him feel a sudden need.

Angelique blushed in the dense twilight, her face taking childlike lines
of apprehension. Her heart sank, and she suffered for him vicariously
in advance. Her sensibility to other presences was so keen that she had
once made it a subject of confession. "Father, I cannot feel any
separateness from the people around me. Is this a sin?" "Believe that
you have the saints and holy angels also in your company, and it will be
no sin," answered Father Olivier.

Though she was used to these queer demonstrations of men, her conscience
always rebuked her for the number of offers she received. No sooner did
she feel on terms of excellent friendliness with any man than he began
to fondle her hand and announce himself her lover. It must be as her
tante-gra'mere said, that girls had too much liberty in the Territory.
Jules Vigo and Billy Edgar had both proposed in one day, and Angelique
hid herself in the loom-house, feeling peculiarly humbled and ashamed to
face the family, until her godmother had her almost forcibly brought
back to the usual post.

"I love you," said Rice Jones.

"But please, no, Monsieur Zhone, no."

"I love you," he repeated, compressing his lips. "Why 'no, Monsieur
Zhone, no'?"

"I do not know." Angelique drew her hand back and arranged her roses
over and over, looking down at them in blind distress.

"Is it Pierre Menard?"

She glanced up at him reproachfully.

"Oh, monsieur, it is only that I do not want"--She put silence in the
place of words. "Monsieur," she then appealed, "why do men ask girls who
do not want them to? If one appeared anxious, then it would be
reasonable."

"Not to men," said Rice, smiling. "We will have what is hard to be got.
I shall have you, my Angelique. I will wait."