“The English is very faulty here,” he said, without looking up.  “He mentions Bras-Coupe.”  Palmyre started and turned toward him; but he went on without lifting his eyes.  “He speaks of your old pride and affection toward him as one who with your aid might have been a leader and deliverer of his people.”  Frowenfeld looked up.  “Do you under—­”

“Allez, Miche” said she, leaning forward, her great eyes fixed on the apothecary and her face full of distress. “Mo comprend bien.”

“He asks you to let him be to you in the place of Bras-Coupe.”

The eyes of the philosophe, probably for the first time since the death of the giant, lost their pride.  They gazed upon Frowenfeld almost with piteousness; but she compressed her lips and again slowly shook her head.

“You see,” said Frowenfeld, suddenly feeling a new interest, “he understands their wants.  He knows their wrongs.  He is acquainted with laws and men.  He could speak for them.  It would not be insurrection—­it would be advocacy.  He would give his time, his pen, his speech, his means, to get them justice—­to get them their rights.”

She hushed the over-zealous advocate with a sad and bitter smile and essayed to speak, studied as if for English words, and, suddenly abandoning that attempt, said, with ill-concealed scorn and in the Creole patois: 

“What is all that?  What I want is vengeance!”

“I will finish reading,” said Frowenfeld, quickly, not caring to understand the passionate speech.

     “Ah, Palmyre!  Palmyre!  What you love and hope to love you
     because his heart keep itself free, he is loving another!”

"Qui ci ca, Miche?"

Frowenfeld was loth to repeat.  She had understood, as her face showed; but she dared not believe.  He made it shorter: 

“He means that Honore Grandissime loves another woman.”

“’Tis a lie!” she exclaimed, a better command of English coming with the momentary loss of restraint.

The apothecary thought a moment and then decided to speak.

“I do not think so,” he quietly said.

“’Ow you know dat?”

She, too, spoke quietly, but under a fearful strain.  She had thrown herself forward, but, as she spoke, forced herself back into her seat.

“He told me so himself.”

The tall figure of Palmyre rose slowly and silently from her chair, her eyes lifted up and her lips moving noiselessly.  She seemed to have lost all knowledge of place or of human presence.  She walked down the drawing-room quite to its curtained windows and there stopped, her face turned away and her hand laid with a visible tension on the back of a chair.  She remained so long that Frowenfeld had begun to think of leaving her so, when she turned and came back.  Her form was erect, her step firm and nerved, her lips set together and her hands dropped easily at her side; but when she came close up before the apothecary she was trembling.  For a moment she seemed speechless, and then, while her eyes gleamed with passion, she said, in a cold, clear tone, and in her native patois: