o mixed up--I think he was
half drunk--that he could not remember. They were going to hand him over
to the guard, but he begged so piteously they let him off. Then he and
Louis Marsac took another drink."

Jeanne suddenly snatched up her skirt and scrubbed her mouth vigorously.

"It has been a tiresome day," exclaimed Pani, "and thou must have a
mouthful of supper, little one, and go to bed."

She put her arm over the child's shoulder, with a caress; and Jeanne
pressed her rosy cheek on the hand.

"I do not want any supper but I will go to bed at once," she replied in
a weary tone.

"It is said that at the eastward in the Colonies they keep just such a
July day with flags and confusion and cannon firing and bells ringing.
One such day in a lifetime is enough for me," declared Madame De Ber.

They kept the Fourth of July ever afterward, but this was really their
national birthday.

Jeanne scrubbed her mouth again before she said her little prayer and in
five minutes she was soundly asleep. But the man who had kissed her and
who had been her childhood's friend staggered homeward after a
roistering evening, never losing sight of the blow she had struck him.

"The tiger cat!" he said with what force he could summon. "She shall pay
for this, if it is ten years! In three or four years I will marry her
and then I will train her to know who is master. She shall get down on
her knees to me if she is handsome as a princess, if she were a queen's
daughter."

Laurent St. Armand went home to his father a good deal amused after all
his disappointment and vexation, for he had been compelled to take an
inferior canoe.

"_Mon pere_," he said, as his father sat contentedly smoking, stretched
out in a most comfortable fashion, "I have seen your little gossip of
the morning, and I came near being in a quarrel with a son of the trader
De Marsac, but we settled it amicably and I should have had a much
better opinion of him, if he had not stopped to drink Jogue's vile
brandy. He's a handsome fellow, too."

"And is the little girl his sister?"

"O no, not in anyway related." Then Laurent told the story, guessing at
the kiss from the blow that had followed.

"Good, I like that," declared St. Armand. "Whose child is it?"

"That I do not know, but she lives up near the Citadel and her name is
Jeanne Angelot. Shall I find her for you to-morrow?"

"She is a brave little girl."

"I do not like Marsac."

"His mother was an India