leased to have ye come and stop a spell with
us at the grist-mill. Any of your folks in the grist business?"

"Grisst?" Ste. Valerie looked helplessly at me. I explained briefly the
nature of a grist-mill, and said truly that Ham's mill was one of the
pleasantest places in the neighbourhood. Yvon was enchanted. He would
come with the most lively pleasure, he assured Ham, so soon as Madame
Belfort's health should be sufficiently rehabilitated. I remember,
Melody, the pride with which he rolled out that long word, and the
delight with which he looked at me, to see if I noticed it.

"Meantime," he added, "I shall haste at the earliest moment to do myself
the honour to call, to make inquiries for the health of madame, to
present my respectful homages to monsieur your father. He will permit me
to embrace him as a son?"

Fortunately Ham only heard the first part of this sentence; he responded
heartily, begging the marquis to call at any hour. Then, being at the
end of his talk, he shook hands once more with ponderous good will, and
passed on, he and the oxen rolling along with equal steps.

Ste. Valerie was silent until Ham was out of earshot; then he broke out.

"Holy Blue! what a prodigy! You suffer this to burst upon me, Jacques,
without notice, without preparation. My nerves are permanently
shattered. You tell me, a man; I behold a tower, a mountain, Atlas
crowned with clouds! Thousand thunders! what bulk! what sinews! and of
my race! Amazing effect of--what? Climate? occupation? In France, this
race shrinks, diminishes; a rapier, keen if you will, but slender like a
thread; here, it swells, expands, towers aloft,--a club of Hercules. And
with my father, who could sit in my pocket, and my grandfather, who
could sit in his! Figure to yourself, Jacques, that I am called _le
grand Yvon!_" He was silent for a moment, then broke out again. "But the
mind. D'Arthenay! the brain; how is it with that? Thought,--a lightning
flash! is it not lost, wandering through a head large like that of an
ox?"

I cannot remember in what words I answered him, Melody. I know I was
troubled how to make it clear to him, and he so different from the
other. I seemed to stand midway between the two, and to understand both.
Half of me seemed to spring up in joy at the voice of the young
foreigner; his lightness, his quickness, the very way he moved his
hands, seemed a part of my own nature that I had not learned to use, and
now saw reflected in a