“Miche Vignevielle, I wizh you pliz led”—­

“Madame Carraze,” he said, turning so suddenly as to make the frightened little woman start, but extending his palm with a show of frankness, and assuming a look of benignant patience, “’ow I kin fine doze note now, mongs’ all de rez?  Iv you p’iz nod to mague me doze troub’.”

The dimmest shadow of a smile seemed only to give his words a more kindly authoritative import, and as he turned away again with a manner suggestive of finality, Madame Delphine found no choice but to depart.  But she went away loving the ground beneath the feet of Monsieur U.L.  Vignevielle.

“Oh, Pere Jerome!” she exclaimed in the corrupt French of her caste, meeting the little father on the street a few days later, “you told the truth that day in your parlor. Mo conne li a c’t heure.  I know him now; he is just what you called him.”

“Why do you not make him your banker, also, Madame Delphine?”

“I have done so this very day!” she replied, with more happiness in her eyes than Pere Jerome had ever before seen there.

“Madame Delphine,” he said, his own eyes sparkling, “make him your daughter’s guardian; for myself, being a priest, it would not be best; but ask him; I believe he will not refuse you.”

Madame Delphine’s face grew still brighter as he spoke.

“It was in my mind,” she said.

Yet to the timorous Madame Delphine many trifles became, one after another, an impediment to the making of this proposal, and many weeks elapsed before further delay was positively without excuse.  But at length, one day in May, 1822, in a small private office behind Monsieur Vignevielle’s banking-room,—­he sitting beside a table, and she, more timid and demure than ever, having just taken a chair by the door,—­she said, trying, with a little bashful laugh, to make the matter seem unimportant, and yet with some tremor of voice: 

“Miche Vignevielle, I bin maguing my will.” (Having commenced their acquaintance in English, they spoke nothing else.)

“’Tis a good idy,” responded the banker.

“I kin mague you de troub’ to kib dad will fo’ me Miche Vignevielle?”

“Yez.”

She looked up with grateful re-assurance; but her eyes dropped again as she said: 

“Miche Vignevielle”—­Here she choked, and began her peculiar motion of laying folds in the skirt of her dress, with trembling fingers.  She lifted her eyes, and as they met the look of deep and placid kindness that was in his face, some courage returned, and she said: 

“Miche.”

“Wad you wand?” asked he, gently.

“If it arrive to me to die”—­

“Yez?”

Her words were scarcely audible: 

“I wand you teg kyah my lill’ girl.”

“You ‘ave one lill’ gal, Madame Carraze?”

She nodded with her face down.

“An’ you godd some mo’ chillen?”