This throng, shifting like the fragments of colored glass in the kaleidoscope, had its far-away interest to the contemplative Joseph.  To them he was of little interest, or none.  Of the many passers, scarcely an occasional one greeted him, and such only with an extremely polite and silent dignity which seemed to him like saying something of this sort:  “Most noble alien, give you good-day—­stay where you are.  Profoundly yours—­”

Two men came through the Place d’Armes on conspicuously fine horses.  One it is not necessary to describe.  The other, a man of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four years of age, was extremely handsome and well dressed, the martial fashion of the day showing his tall and finely knit figure to much advantage.  He sat his horse with an uncommon grace, and, as he rode beside his companion, spoke and gave ear by turns with an easy dignity sufficient of itself to have attracted popular observation.  It was the apothecary’s unknown friend.  Frowenfeld noticed them while they were yet in the middle of the grounds.  He could hardly have failed to do so, for some one close beside his bench in undoubted allusion to one of the approaching figures exclaimed: 

“Here comes Honore Grandissime.”

Moreover, at that moment there was a slight unwonted stir on the Place d’Armes.  It began at the farther corner of the square, hard by the Principal, and spread so quickly through the groups near about, that in a minute the entire company were quietly made aware of something going notably wrong in their immediate presence.  There was no running to see it.  There seemed to be not so much as any verbal communication of the matter from mouth to mouth.  Rather a consciousness appeared to catch noiselessly from one to another as the knowledge of human intrusion comes to groups of deer in a park.  There was the same elevating of the head here and there, the same rounding of beautiful eyes.  Some stared, others slowly approached, while others turned and moved away; but a common indignation was in the breast of that thing dreadful everywhere, but terrible in Louisiana, the Majority.  For there, in the presence of those good citizens, before the eyes of the proudest and fairest mothers and daughters of New Orleans, glaringly, on the open Plaza, the Creole whom Joseph had met by the graves in the field, Honore Grandissime, the uttermost flower on the topmost branch of the tallest family tree ever transplanted from France to Louisiana, Honore,—­the worshiped, the magnificent,—­in the broad light of the sun’s going down, rode side by side with the Yankee governor and was not ashamed!

Joseph, on his bench, sat contemplating the two parties to this scandal as they came toward him.  Their horses’ flanks were damp from some pleasant gallop, but their present gait was the soft, mettlesome movement of animals who will even submit to walk if their masters insist.  As they wheeled out of the broad diagonal path that crossed the square, and turned toward him in the highway, he fancied that the Creole observed him.  He was not mistaken.  As they seemed about to pass the spot where he sat, M. Grandissime interrupted the governor with a word and, turning his horse’s head, rode up to the bench, lifting his hat as he came.