“Ah!  ‘Sieur Frowenfel’, iv I tra to tell de sto’y of Bras-Coupe, I goin’ to cry lag a lill bebby.”

The account of the childhood days upon the plantation at Cannes Brulees may be passed by.  It was early in Palmyre’s fifteenth year that that Kentuckian, ‘mutual friend’ of her master and Agricola, prevailed with M. de Grapion to send her to the paternal Grandissime mansion,—­a complimentary gift, through Agricola, to Mademoiselle, his niece,—­returnable ten years after date.

The journey was made in safety; and, by and by, Palmyre was presented to her new mistress.  The occasion was notable.  In a great chair in the centre sat the grandpere, a Chevalier de Grandissime, whose business had narrowed down to sitting on the front veranda and wearing his decorations,—­the cross of St. Louis being one; on his right, Colonel Numa Grandissime, with one arm dropped around Honore, then a boy of Palmyre’s age, expecting to be off in sixty days for France; and on the left, with Honore’s fair sister nestled against her, “Madame Numa,” as the Creoles would call her, a stately woman and beautiful, a great admirer of her brother Agricola. (Aurora took pains to explain that she received these minutiae from Palmyre herself in later years.) One other member of the group was a young don of some twenty years’ age, not an inmate of the house, but only a cousin of Aurora on her deceased mother’s side.  To make the affair complete, and as a seal to this tacit Grandissime-de-Grapion treaty, this sole available representative of the “other side” was made a guest for the evening.  Like the true Spaniard that he was, Don Jose Martinez fell deeply in love with Honore’s sister.  Then there came Agricola leading in Palmyre.  There were others, for the Grandissime mansion was always full of Grandissimes; but this was the central group.

In this house Palmyre grew to womanhood, retaining without interruption the place into which she seemed to enter by right of indisputable superiority over all competitors,—­the place of favorite attendant to the sister of Honore.  Attendant, we say, for servant she never seemed.  She grew tall, arrowy, lithe, imperial, diligent, neat, thorough, silent.  Her new mistress, though scarcely at all her senior, was yet distinctly her mistress; she had that through her Fusilier blood; experience was just then beginning to show that the Fusilier Grandissime was a superb variety; she was a mistress one could wish to obey.  Palmyre loved her, and through her contact ceased, for a time, at least, to be the pet leopard she had been at the Cannes Brulees.

Honore went away to Paris only sixty days after Palmyre entered the house.  But even that was not soon enough.

“’Sieur Frowenfel’,” said Aurora, in her recital, “Palmyre, she never tole me dad, mais I am shoe, shoe dad she fall in love wid Honore Grandissime.  ‘Sieur Frowenfel’, I thing dad Honore Grandissime is one bad man, ent it?  Whad you thing, ’Sieur Frowenfel’?”