, O God! Thou knowest! Oh, Olive, my
own daughter!"

She ceased, and was still. Pere Jerome waited, but no sound came. He
looked through the window. She was kneeling, with her forehead resting
on her arms--motionless.

He repeated the words of absolution. Still she did not stir.

"My daughter," he said, "go to thy home in peace." But she did not move.

He rose hastily, stepped from the box, raised her in his arms, and
called her by name:

"Madame Delphine!" Her head fell back in his elbow; for an instant there
was life in the eyes--it glimmered--it vanished, and tears gushed from
his own and fell upon the gentle face of the dead, as he looked up to
heaven and cried:

"Lord, lay not this sin to her charge!"

CAFE DES EXILES.

That which in 1835--I think he said thirty-five--was a reality in the
Rue Burgundy--I think he said Burgundy--is now but a reminiscence. Yet
so vividly was its story told me, that at this moment the old Cafe des
Exiles appears before my eye, floating in the clouds of revery, and I
doubt not I see it just as it was in the old times.

An antiquated story-and-a-half Creole cottage sitting right down on the
banquette, as do the Choctaw squaws who sell bay and sassafras and
life-everlasting, with a high, close board-fence shutting out of view
the diminutive garden on the southern side. An ancient willow droops
over the roof of round tiles, and partly hides the discolored stucco,
which keeps dropping off into the garden as though the old cafe was
stripping for the plunge into oblivion--disrobing for its execution. I
see, well up in the angle of the broad side gable, shaded by its rude
awning of clapboards, as the eyes of an old dame are shaded by her
wrinkled hand, the window of Pauline. Oh for the image of the maiden,
were it but for one moment, leaning out of the casement to hang her
mocking-bird and looking down into the garden,--where, above the barrier
of old boards, I see the top of the fig-tree, the pale green clump of
bananas, the tall palmetto with its jagged crown, Pauline's own two
orange-trees holding up their bands toward the window, heavy with the
promises of autumn; the broad, crimson mass of the many-stemmed
oleander, and the crisp boughs of the pomegranate loaded with freckled
apples, and with here and there a lingering scarlet blossom.

The Cafe des Exiles, to use a figure, flowered, bore fruit, and dropped
it long ago--or rather Time and Fate, like some uncursed