As Rice Jones entered the house, after his talk about Angelique with young Pierre Menard, he met her coming out.  It was the first time that her twilight visits to his sister had brought them face to face, and Rice directly turned off through the garden with her, inquiring how Maria had borne the noise of the day.

“She is very quiet,” said Angelique.  “She was indeed falling asleep when I came out.”

“I sent my man at noon and at three o’clock to bring me word of her.”

There was still a great trampling of horses in the streets.  Shouts of departing happy voters sounded from the Okaw bridge, mixing with the songs of river men.  The primrose lights of many candles began to bloom all over Kaskaskia.  Rice parted the double hedge of currant bushes which divided his father’s garden from Saucier’s, and followed Angelique upon her own gravel walk, holding her by his sauntering.  They could smell the secluded mould in the shadow of the currant roots, which dew was just reaching.  She went to a corner where a thicket of roses grew.  She had taken a handful of them to Maria, and now gathered a fresh handful for herself, reaching in deftly with mitted arms, holding her gown between her knees to keep it back from the briers.  Some of them were wild roses, with a thin layer of petals and effulgent yellow centres.  There was a bouquet of garden-breaths from gray-green sage and rosemary leaves and the countless herbs and vegetables which every slaveholding Kaskaskian cultivated for his large household.  Pink and red hollyhocks stood sentinel along the paths.  The slave cabins, the loom-house, the kitchen, and a row of straw beehives were ranged at the back of the lawn, edging the garden.

Angelique came back to the main walk, picking her way with slipper toes, and offered part of her spoil to Rice.  He took some roses, and held the hand which gave them.  She had come in his way too soon after his mocking little talk with young Pierre Menard.  He was occupied with other things, but that had made him feel a sudden need.

Angelique blushed in the dense twilight, her face taking childlike lines of apprehension.  Her heart sank, and she suffered for him vicariously in advance.  Her sensibility to other presences was so keen that she had once made it a subject of confession.  “Father, I cannot feel any separateness from the people around me.  Is this a sin?” “Believe that you have the saints and holy angels also in your company, and it will be no sin,” answered Father Olivier.

Though she was used to these queer demonstrations of men, her conscience always rebuked her for the number of offers she received.  No sooner did she feel on terms of excellent friendliness with any man than he began to fondle her hand and announce himself her lover.  It must be as her tante-gra’mere said, that girls had too much liberty in the Territory.  Jules Vigo and Billy Edgar had both proposed in one day, and Angelique hid herself in the loom-house, feeling peculiarly humbled and ashamed to face the family, until her godmother had her almost forcibly brought back to the usual post.