Exchange as it were old Mother Hubbard she went to the
cupboard to get her poor dog a bone but when she got there the
cupboard--don't smile so broadly--was bare and so the poor dog had
none will that be satisfactory?"

Claude nodded, and as they turned again to their companions the
exchange was made with the grace, silence, and calm unconsciousness of
pure oversight,--or of general complicity. Very soon it suited
Zosephine and Tarbox to sit down upon a little bench beside a bed of
heart's-ease and listen to the orchestra. But Marguerite preferred to
walk in and out among the leafy shadows of the electric lamps.

And so, side by side, as he had once seen Bonaventure and Sidonie go,
they went, Claude and Marguerite, away from all windings of
disappointment, all shadows of doubt, all shoals of misapprehension,
out upon the open sea of mutual love. Not that the great word of
words--affirmative or interrogative--was spoken then or there. They
came no nearer to it than this,--

"I wish," murmured Claude,--they had gone over all the delicious
"And-I-thought-that-you's" and the sweetly reproachful "Did-you-
think-that-I's," and had covered the past down to the meeting on the
bridge,--"I wish," he murmured, dropping into the old Acadian French,
which he had never spoken to her before,--"I wish"--

"What?" she replied, softly and in the same tongue.

"I wish," he responded, "that this path might never end." He wondered
at his courage, and feared that now he had ruined all; for she made no
answer. But when he looked down upon her she looked up and smiled. A
little farther on she dropped her fan. He stooped and picked it up,
and, in restoring it, somehow their hands touched,--touched and
lingered; and then--and then--through one brief unspeakable moment, a
maiden's hand, for the first time in his life, lay willingly in his.
Then, as glad as she was frightened, Marguerite said she must go back
to her mother, and they went.

CHAPTER XXII.

A DOUBLE LOVE-KNOT.

Spanish Fort--West End--they are well enough; but if I might have one
small part of New Orleans to take with me wherever I may wander in
this earthly pilgrimage, I should ask for the old Carrollton Gardens.

They lie near the farthest upper limit of the expanded city. I should
want, of course, to include the levee, under which runs one side of
the gardens' fence; also the opposite shore of the Mississippi, with
its just discernible plantation houses behind th