“H’mm! but only for the virtues of a slave.”

Chester smiled round from the shelves:  “I noticed that!  I’m afraid we white folks, the world over, are prone to do that—­with you-all.”

“Yes, when you speak of us at all.”

“Ducatel’s opposite neighbor,” Chester remarked, “is an antique even more interesting.”

“Ah, yes!  Castanado is antique only in that art spirit which the tourist trade is every day killing even in Royal Street.”

“That’s the worst decay in this whole decaying quarter,” the young man said.

“And in all this deluge of trade spirit,” Ovide continued, “the best dry land left of it—­of that spirit of art—­is——­”

“Castanado’s shop, I dare say.”

“Castanado’s and three others in that one square you pass every day without discovering the fact.  But that’s natural; you are a busy lawyer.”

“Not so very.  What are the other three?”

“First, the shop of Seraphine Alexandre, embroideries; then of Scipion Beloiseau, ornamental ironwork, opposite Mme. Seraphine and next below Ducatel—­Ducatel, alas, he don’t count; and third, of Placide La Porte, perfumeries, next to Beloiseau.  That’s all.”

“Not the watchmaker on the square above?”

“Ah! distantly he’s of them:  and there was old Manouvrier, taxidermist; but he’s gone—­where the spirits of art and of worship are twin.”

Chester turned sharply again to the shelves and stood rigid.  From an inner room, its glass door opened by Ovide’s silver-spectacled wife, came the little black cupid and his charge.  Ah, once more what perfection in how many points!  As she returned to Ovide an old magazine, at last he heard her voice—­singularly deep and serene.  She thanked the bookman for his loan and, with the child, went out.

It disturbed the Southern youth to unbosom himself to a black man, but he saw no decent alternative:  “Landry, I had not the faintest idea that that young lady was nearer than Castanado’s shop!”

Ovide shook his head:  “You seem yourself to forget that you are here by business appointment.  And what of it if you have seen her, or she seen you, here—­or anywhere?”

“Only this:  that I’ve met her so often by pure—­by chance, on that square you speak of, I bound for the court-house, she for I can’t divine where—­for I’ve never looked behind me!—­that I’ve had to take another street to show I’m a gentleman.  This very morn’—­oh!—­and now! here!  How can I explain—­or go unexplained?”

Ovide lifted a hand:  “Will you leave that to my wife, so unlearned yet so wise and good?  For the young lady’s own sake my wife, without explaining, will see that you are not misjudged.”

“Good!  Right!  Any explanation would simply belie itself.  Yes, let her do it!  But, Landry——­”

“Yes?”

“For heaven’s sake don’t let her make me out a goody-goody.  I haven’t got this far into life without making moral mistakes, some of them huge.  But in this thing—­I say it only to you—­I’m making none.  I’m neither a marrying man, a villain, nor an ass.”