, not of willing consent, but of desperate
resolution.

"It would be useless, anyhow," said the mother, laying her arm around
her daughter's waist.

Olive repeated the kiss, prolonging it passionately.

"I have nobody but you," murmured the girl; "I am a poor quadroone!"

She threw back her plaited hair for a third embrace, when a sound in the
shrubbery startled them.

"_Qui ci ca?_" called Madame Delphine, in a frightened voice, as the two
stood up, holding to each other.

No answer.

"It was only the dropping of a twig," she whispered, after a long
holding of the breath. But they went into the house and barred it
everywhere.

It was no longer pleasant to sit up. They retired, and in course of
time, but not soon, they fell asleep, holding each other very tight, and
fearing, even in their dreams, to hear another twig fall.

CHAPTER X.

BIRDS.

Monsieur Vignevielle looked in at no more doors or windows; but if the
disappearance of this symptom was a favorable sign, others came to
notice which were especially bad,--for instance, wakefulness. At
well-nigh any hour of the night, the city guard, which itself dared not
patrol singly, would meet him on his slow, unmolested, sky-gazing walk.

"Seems to enjoy it," said Jean Thompson; "the worst sort of evidence. If
he showed distress of mind, it would not be so bad; but his
calmness,--ugly feature."

The attorney had held his ground so long that he began really to believe
it was tenable.

By day, it is true, Monsieur Vignevielle was at his post in his quiet
"bank." Yet here, day by day, he was the source of more and more vivid
astonishment to those who held preconceived notions of a banker's
calling. As a banker, at least, he was certainly out of balance; while
as a promenader, it seemed to those who watched him that his ruling idea
had now veered about, and that of late he was ever on the quiet alert,
not to find, but to evade, somebody.

"Olive, my child," whispered Madame Delphine one morning, as the pair
were kneeling side by side on the tiled floor of the church, "yonder is
Miche Vignevielle! If you will only look at once--he is just passing a
little in----. Ah, much too slow again; he stepped out by the side
door."

The mother thought it a strange providence that Monsieur Vignevielle
should always be disappearing whenever Olive was with her.

One early dawn, Madame Delphine, with a small empty basket on her arm,
stepped out upon the _banquet