Ovide smiled:  “My wife can manage that.  Maybe it’s good you came here.  It may well be that the young lady herself would be glad if some one explained her to you.”

“Hoh! does an angel need an explanation?”

“I should say, in Royal Street, yes.”

“Then for mercy’s sake give it! right here! you! come!” The youth laughed.  “Mercy to me, I mean.  But—­wait!  Tell me; couldn’t Castanado have given it, as easily as you?”

“You never gave Castanado this chance.”

“How do you know that?  Oh, never mind, go ahead—­full speed.”

“Well, she’s an orphan, of a fine old family——­”

“Obviously!  Creole, of course, the family?”

“Yes, though always small in Louisiana.  Creole except one New England grandmother.  But for that one she would not have been here just now.”

“Humph! that’s rather obscure but—­go on.”

“Her parents left her without a sou or a relation except two maiden aunts as poor as she.”

“Antiques?”

“Yes.  She earns their living and her own.”

“You don’t care to say how?”

“She wouldn’t like it.  ’Twould be to say where.”

“She seems able to dress exquisitely.”

“Mr. Chester, a woman would see with what a small outlay that is done.  She has that gift for the needle which a poet has for the pen.”

“Ho! that’s charmingly antique.  But now tell me how having a Yankee grandmother caused her to drop in here just now.  Your logic’s dim.”

“You are soon to go to Castanado’s to see that manuscript story, are you not?”

“Oh, is it a story?  Have you read it?”

“Yes, I’ve read it, ’tis short.  They wanted my opinion.  And ’tis a story, though true.”

“A story!  Love story? very absorbing?”

“No, it is not of love—­except love of liberty.  Whether ’twill absorb you or no I cannot say.  Me it absorbed because it is the story of some of my race, far from here and in the old days, trying, in the old vain way, to gain their freedom.”

“Has—­has mademoiselle read it?”

“Certainly.  It is her property; hers and her two aunts’.  Those two, they bought it lately, of a poor devil—­drinking man—­for a dollar.  They had once known his mother, from the West Indies.”

“He wrote it, or his mother?”

“The mother, long ago.  ’Tis not too well done.  It absorbs mademoiselle also, but that is because ’tis true.  When I saw that effect I told her of a story like it, yet different, and also seeming true, in this old magazine.  And when I began to tell it she said, ’It is true!  My Vermont grand’mere wrote that!  It happened to her!’”

“How queer!  And, Landry, I see the connection.  Your magazine being one of a set, you couldn’t let her read it anywhere but here.”

“I have to keep my own rules.”

“Let me see it. . . .  Oh, now, why not?  What was the use of either of us explaining if—­if——?”