“No need to look,” grunted Kauffman, who had everything in his head.  “It’s all O.K.  They pay all losses within ten days.”

Mrs. Sharp soon rose to depart.  She had arranged to remain in town until the policy was paid.  The commissioner did not detain her.  She was a woman, and he did not know just what to say to her at present.  Rest and time would bring her what she needed.

But, as she was leaving, Luke Standifer indulged himself in an official remark: 

“The Department of Insurance, Statistics, and History, ma’am, has done the best it could with your case.  ’Twas a case hard to cover according to red tape.  Statistics failed, and History missed fire, but, if I may be permitted to say it, we came out particularly strong on Insurance.”

XVII

THE RENAISSANCE AT CHARLEROI

Grandemont Charles was a little Creole gentleman, aged thirty-four, with a bald spot on the top of his head and the manners of a prince.  By day he was a clerk in a cotton broker’s office in one of those cold, rancid mountains of oozy brick, down near the levee in New Orleans.  By night, in his three-story-high chambre garnier in the old French Quarter he was again the last male descendant of the Charles family, that noble house that had lorded it in France, and had pushed its way smiling, rapiered, and courtly into Louisiana’s early and brilliant days.  Of late years the Charleses had subsided into the more republican but scarcely less royally carried magnificence and ease of plantation life along the Mississippi.  Perhaps Grandemont was even Marquis de Brasse.  There was that title in the family.  But a Marquis on seventy-five dollars per month! Vraiment! Still, it has been done on less.

Grandemont had saved out of his salary the sum of six hundred dollars.  Enough, you would say, for any man to marry on.  So, after a silence of two years on that subject, he reopened that most hazardous question to Mlle. Adele Fauquier, riding down to Meade d’Or, her father’s plantation.  Her answer was the same that it had been any time during the last ten years:  “First find my brother, Monsieur Charles.”

This time he had stood before her, perhaps discouraged by a love so long and hopeless, being dependent upon a contingency so unreasonable, and demanded to be told in simple words whether she loved him or no.

Adele looked at him steadily out of her gray eyes that betrayed no secrets and answered, a little more softly: 

“Grandemont, you have no right to ask that question unless you can do what I ask of you.  Either bring back brother Victor to us or the proof that he died.”

Somehow, though five times thus rejected, his heart was not so heavy when he left.  She had not denied that she loved.  Upon what shallow waters can the bark of passion remain afloat!  Or, shall we play the doctrinaire, and hint that at thirty-four the tides of life are calmer and cognizant of many sources instead of but one—­as at four-and-twenty?