On cautious shoe leather the march began.  One voice, two voices, and finally a low chorus intoned and repeated,—­

“Hempseed, I sow thee,—­hempseed, I sow thee; let him who is to marry me come after me and mow thee.”

Peggy led her followers out of the east door towards the river; wheeling when she reached a little wind-row of rotted timbers.  This chaos had once stood up in order, forming makeshift bastions for the fort, and supporting cannon.  Such boards and posts as the negroes had not carried off lay now along the river brink, and the Okaw was steadily undermining that brink as it had already undermined and carried away the Jesuits’ spacious landing.

Glancing over their shoulders with secret laughter for that fearful gleam of scythes which was to come, the girls marched back; and their leader’s abrupt halt jarred the entire line.  A man stood in the opposite entrance.  They could not see him in outline, but his unmistakable hat showed against a low-lying sky.

“Who’s there?” demanded Peggy Morrison.

The intruder made no answer.

They could not see a scythe about him, but to every girl he took a different form.  He was Billy Edgar, or Jules Vigo, or Rice Jones, or any other gallant of Kaskaskia, according to the varying faith which beating hearts sent to the eyes that saw him.

The spell of silence did not last.  A populous roost invaded by a fox never resounded with more squalling than did the old Jesuit College.  The girls swished around corners and tumbled over the vegetable beds.  Angelique groped for Maria, not daring to call her name, and caught and ran with some one until they neared the light, when she found it was the dumpy little figure of her cousin Clarice.

As soon as the girls were gone, the man who had broken up their hempseed sowing advanced a few steps on the pavement.  He listened, and that darker shadow in the angle of the walls was perceptible to him.

“Are you here?”

“I am here,” answered Maria.

Rice Jones’s sister could not sit many minutes in the damp old building without being missed by the girls and her family.  His voice trembled.  She could hear his heart beating with large strokes.  His presence surrounded her like an atmosphere, and in the darkness she clutched her own breast to keep the rapture from physically hurting her.

“Maria, did you know that my wife was dead?”

“Oh, James, no!”

Her whisper was more than a caress.  It was surrender and peace and forgiveness.  It was the snapping of a tension which had held her two years.

“Oh, James, when I saw you to-night I did not know what to do.  I have not been well.  You have borne it so much better than I have.”

“I thought,” said Dr. Dunlap, “it would be best for us to talk matters over.”

She caught her breath.  What was the matter with this man?  Once he had lain at her feet and kissed the hem of her garment.  He was hers.  She had never relinquished her ownership of him even when her honor had constrained her to live apart from him.  Whose could he be but hers?