mostly to be described from imagination or experience.
What is inferred is that what Adorine longed and thought and looked
in silence and resignation, according to woman's way, he suffered
equally, but in a man's way, which is not one of silence or
resignation,--at least when one is a man of eighteen,--the last
interview, the near wedding, her beauty, his love, her house in sight,
the full moon, the long, wakeful nights.

He took his pirogue; but the bayou played with his impatience,
maddened his passion, bringing him so near, to meander with him again
so far away. There was only a short prairie between him and ----, a
prairie thick with lily-roots--one could almost walk over their
heads, so close, and gleaming in the moonlight. But this is all only
inference.

The pirogue was found tethered to the paddle stuck upright in the soft
bank, and--Adorine's parents related the rest. Nothing else was found
until the summer drought had bared the swamp.

There was a little girl in the house when we arrived--all else were in
the field--a stupid, solemn, pretty child, the child of a brother. How
she kept away from Adorine, and how much that testified!

It would have been too painful. The little arms around her neck, the
head nestling to her bosom, sleepily pressing against it. And the
little one might ask to be sung to sleep. Sung to sleep!

The little bed-chamber, with its high mattressed bed, covered with
the Acadian home-spun quilt, trimmed with netting fringe, its bit of
mirror over the bureau, the bottle of perfumed grease to keep the
locks black and glossy, the prayer-beads and blessed palms hanging
on the wall, the low, black polished spinning-wheel, the loom,--the
_metier d' Adorine_ famed throughout the parish,--the ever goodly
store of cotton and yarn hanks swinging from the ceiling, and the
little square, open window which looked under the mossy oak-branches
to look over the prairie; and once again all blue and white
lilies--they were all there, as Adorine was there; but there was
more--not there.

ANNE MARIE AND JEANNE MARIE

Old Jeanne Marie leaned her hand against the house, and the tears
rolled down her cheeks. She had not wept since she buried her last
child. With her it was one trouble, one weeping, no more; and her
wrinkled, hard, polished skin so far had known only the tears that
come after death. The trouble in her heart now was almost exactly like
the trouble caused by death; although she knew