Girls slipped back and forth through the church gate.  Now their laughing faces grouped three or four together in the bonfire light.  In a moment, when their mothers turned to follow them with the eye, they were nowhere to be seen.  Perhaps outside the beacon’s glare hobgoblins and fairies danced.  Midsummer Night tricks and the freemasonry of youth were at work.

People watched one another across that pile with diverse aims.  Rice Jones had his sister on his arm, wrapped in a Spanish mantilla.  Her tiny face, with a rose above one ear, was startling against this black setting.  They stood near Father Baby’s booth; and while Peggy Morrison waited at the church gate to signal Maria, she resented Rice Jones’s habitual indifference to her existence.  He saw Angelique Saucier beside her mother, and the men gathering to her, among them an officer from Fort Chartres.  They troubled him little; for he intended in due time to put these fellows all out of his way.  There were other matters as vital to Rice Jones.  Young Pierre Menard hovered vainly about him.  The moment Maria left him a squad of country politicians surrounded their political leader, and he did some effectual work for his party by the light of the St. John fire.

Darkness grew outside the irregular radiance of that pile, and the night concert of insects could be heard as an interlude between children’s shouts and the hum of voices.  Peggy Morrison’s lifted finger caught Maria’s glance.  It was an imperative gesture, meaning haste and secrecy, and separation from her brother Rice.  Maria laughed and shook her head wistfully.  The girlish pastimes of Midsummer Night were all done for her.  She thought of nights in her own wild county of Merionethshire, when she had run, palpitating like a hare, to try some spell or charm which might reveal the future to her; and now it was revealed.

An apparition from the other hemisphere came upon her that instant.  She saw a man standing by the friar’s booth looking at her.  What his eyes said she could not, through her shimmering and deadly faintness, perceive.  How could he be here in Kaskaskia?  The shock of seeing him annihilated physical weakness in her.  She stood on limbs of stone.  Her hand on her brother’s arm did not tremble; but a pinched blueness spread about her nostrils and eye sockets, and dinted sudden hollows in her temples.

Dr. Dunlap took a step toward her.  At that, she looked around for some place to hide in, the animal instinct of flight arising first, and darted from her brother into the graveyard.  Rice beheld this freak with quizzical surprise, but he had noted the disappearance of more than one maid through that gate, and was glad to have Maria with them.

“Come on,” whispered Peggy, seizing her.  “Clarice Vigo has gone to fetch Angelique, and then we shall be ready.”

Behind the church, speaking all together like a chorus of blackbirds, the girls were clustered, out of the bonfire’s light.  French and English voices debated.