d through the memory.
During one term of silence Madame Varrillat, a pale, thin-faced, but
cheerful-looking lady, touched Madame Thompson, a person of two and a
half times her weight, on her extensive and snowy bare elbow, directing
her attention obliquely up and across the road.

About a hundred yards distant, in the direction of the river, was a
long, pleasantly shaded green strip of turf, destined in time for a
sidewalk. It had a deep ditch on the nearer side, and a fence of rough
cypress palisades on the farther, and these were overhung, on the one
hand, by a row of bitter orange-trees inside the inclosure, and, on the
other, by a line of slanting china-trees along the outer edge of the
ditch. Down this cool avenue two figures were approaching side by side.
They had first attracted Madame Varrillat's notice by the bright play of
sunbeams which, as they walked, fell upon them in soft, golden flashes
through the chinks between the palisades.

Madame Thompson elevated a pair of glasses which were no detraction from
her very good looks, and remarked, with the serenity of a reconnoitering
general:

"_Pere Jerome et cette milatraise_."

All eyes were bent toward them.

"She walks like a man," said Madame Varrillat, in the language with
which the conversation had opened.

"No," said the physician, "like a woman in a state of high nervous
excitement."

Jean Thompson kept his eyes on the woman, and said:

"She must not forget to walk like a woman in the State of
Louisiana,"--as near as the pun can be translated. The company laughed.
Jean Thompson looked at his wife, whose applause he prized, and she
answered by an asseverative toss of the head, leaning back and
contriving, with some effort, to get her arms folded. Her laugh was
musical and low, but enough to make the folded arms shake gently up and
down.

"Pere Jerome is talking to her," said one. The priest was at that moment
endeavoring, in the interest of peace, to say a good word for the four
people who sat watching his approach. It was in the old strain:

"Blame them one part, Madame Delphine, and their fathers, mothers,
brothers, and fellow-citizens the other ninety-nine."

But to everything she had the one amiable answer which Pere Jerome
ignored:

"I am going to arrange it to satisfy everybody, all together. _Tout a
fait_."

"They are coming here," said Madame Varrillat, half articulately.

"Well, of course," murmured another; and the four rose up,