d. "They are in the
rose garden with mere, or they have gone around to the lawn. Come"; and
she hurried out before him.

Madame Arnault looked at them sharply as they came up to where she was
sitting. "No one!" she echoed, in response to Keith's report. "Then they
really have gone back?"

"Madame knows dat we is hear de boats pass up de bayou whilse m'sieu an'
mam'selle was inside," interposed Marcelite, stooping to pick up her
mistress's cane.

"I would not have thought Suzette so--so indiscreet," said Felice. There
was a note of weariness in her voice.

Madame Arnault looked anxiously at her and then at Keith. The young man
was staring abstractedly at the window, striving to recall the vision
that had appeared there, and he felt, rather than saw, his hostess start
and change color when her eyes fell upon the ring he was wearing. He
lifted his hand covertly, and turned the trinket around in the light,
but he tried in vain to decipher the irregular characters traced upon
it.

"Let us go in," said the old madame. "Felice, my child, thou art
fatigued."

Now when in all her life before was Felice ever fatigued? Felice, whose
strong young arms could send a pirogue flying up the bayou for miles;
Felice, who was ever ready for a tramp along the rose-hedged lanes to
the swamp lakes when the water-lilies were in bloom; to the sugar-house
in grinding-time, down the levee road to St. Joseph's, the little brown
ivy-grown church, whose solitary spire arose slim and straight above
the encircling trees.

Marcelite gave an arm to her mistress, though, in truth, she seemed to
walk a little unsteadily herself. Felice followed with Keith, who was
silent and self-absorbed.

The day passed slowly, a constraint had somehow fallen upon the little
household. Madame Arnault's fine high-bred old face wore its customary
look of calm repose, but her eyes now and then sought her guest with an
expression which he could not have fathomed if he had observed it. But
he saw nothing. A mocking red mouth; a throat made for the kisses of
love; white arms strung with pearls--these were ever before him,
shutting away even the pure sweet face of Felice Arnault.

"Why did I not look at her more closely when I had the opportunity, fool
that I was?" he asked himself, savagely, again and again, revolving in
his mind a dozen pretexts for going at once to the Beauvais plantation,
a mile or so up the bayou. But he felt an inexplicable shyness at the
th