slowly,
"that he may come here. I would like for once to set my eyes on his
face."

An unwonted earnestness in Victorine's tone and a still more unwonted
seriousness in her face arrested Jeanne's attention.

"What is it to thee to see him or not to see him, eh? What is it thou
hast in thy silly head. If thou thinkest thou couldst win him over to
take us back to live in his house again,--which is my own house, to be
sure, if I had my rights,--thy wits are wool-gathering, I can tell thee
that," cried Jeanne. "He has the pride of ten thousand devils in him.
There was that in his face when I drove away from the door,--and he
standing with his head uncovered too,--which I tell thee if I had been a
man I could have killed him for. He take us back! He! he!" And Jeanne
laughed a bitter laugh at the bare idea of the thing.

"I had not thought of any such thing, Aunt Jeanne," replied Victorine,
still speaking slowly, and still with a dreamy expression on her face,
as she leaned out of the window and began idly plucking the blossoms
from a bough of the big pear-tree, which was now all white with flowers
and buzzing with bees. "Dost thou not think the bees steal a little
sweet that ought to go into the fruit?" continued the artful girl, who
did not choose that her aunt should question her any further as to the
reason of her desire to see Willan Blaycke. "I remember that once Father
Anselmo at the convent said to me he thought so. There was a vine of the
wild grape which ran all over the wall between the cloister and the
convent; and when it was in bloom the air sickened one, and thou couldst
hardly go near the wall for the swarming bees that were drinking the
honey from the flowers. And Father Anselmo said one evening that they
were thieves; they stole sweet which ought to go into the grapes."

This was a clever diversion. It turned Jeanne's thoughts at once away
from Willan Blaycke, but it did not save Mademoiselle Victorine from a
catechising quite as sharp as she was in danger of on the other subject.

"And what wert thou doing talking with a priest in the garden at night?"
cried Jeanne, fiercely. "Is that the way maidens are trained in a
convent! Shame on thee, Victorine! what hast thou revealed?"

"The Virgin forbid," answered Victorine, piously, racking her brains
meanwhile for a ready escape from this dilemma, and trying in her fright
to recall precisely what she had just said. "I said not that he told it
to me in the