The girl nodded.  They sank to a bench, the world behind them, the stars above. “Grand’mere, she couldn’t say yes till he’d first go to her home, almost at the Canadian line, and ask her family.  She, she couldn’t go; she couldn’t leave Sidney and Mingo and neither could she take them.  So by railroad at last he got there.  But her family took so long to consent that he got back only the next year and through the fall of the city.  Only by ship could he come, and not till he had begged President Lincoln himself and promised him to work with his might to return Louisiana to the Union.  Well, of course, he and his father had voted against secession, weeping; yet now this was a pledge terrible to keep, and the more because, you see? what to do, and when and how to do it——­”

“Were left to his own judgment and tact?”

“Oh, and honor!  But anyhow he came.  Doubtless, bringing the written permission of the family, he was happy.  Yet to what bitternesses—­can we say bitternesses in English?”

“Indeed we can,” said Chester.

“To what bitternesses grandpere had to return!”

“Aline!” Mme. De l’Isle called; “a table!”

“Yes, madame.  Tell me—­you, Mr. Chester—­to your vision, how all that must have been.”

“Paint in your sketch?  Let me try.  Maybe only because you tell the story, but maybe rather because it’s so easy to see in you a reincarnation of your grand’mere—­a Creole incarnation of that young ’Maud’—­what I see plainest is she.  I see her here, two thousand miles from home, with but three or four friends among a quarter of a million enemies.  I see her on the day the city fell, looking up and down Royal Street from a balcony of the hotel, while from the great dome a few steps behind her the Union fleet could be seen, rounding the first two river bends below the harbor, engaging a last few Confederate guns at the old battle-ground, and coming on, with the Stars and Stripes at every peak.  I see her——­”

“She was beautiful, you know—­grand’mere.”

“Yes, I see her so, looking down from that balcony, awestruck, not fearstruck, on the people who in agonies of rage and terror fled the city by pairs and families, or in armed squads and unarmed mobs swept through the streets and up and down the levee, burning, breaking, and plundering.”

“But that was the worst anybody did, you know.”

“Oh, yes.  We never knew till to-day’s war came how humane that war was.  It wasn’t a war in which beauty, age, and infancy were hideous perils.”

“Ah, never mind about that to-day.  But about grandpere and grand’mere go on.  Let me see how much you can imagine correctly, h’m?”

“Please, mademoiselle, no.  Time has made you—­through your father’s eyes—­they say you have them—­an eye-witness.  So next you see your grandpere getting back at last, by ship—­go on.”