“I love you,” said Rice Jones.

“But please, no, Monsieur Zhone, no.”

“I love you,” he repeated, compressing his lips.  “Why ’no, Monsieur Zhone, no’?”

“I do not know.”  Angelique drew her hand back and arranged her roses over and over, looking down at them in blind distress.

“Is it Pierre Menard?”

She glanced up at him reproachfully.

“Oh, monsieur, it is only that I do not want”—­She put silence in the place of words.  “Monsieur,” she then appealed, “why do men ask girls who do not want them to?  If one appeared anxious, then it would be reasonable.”

“Not to men,” said Rice, smiling.  “We will have what is hard to be got.  I shall have you, my Angelique.  I will wait.”

“Monsieur,” said Angelique, thinking of an obstacle which might block his way, “I am a Catholic, and you are not.”

“Priests don’t frighten me.  And Father Olivier is too sensible an old fellow to object to setting you in the car of my ambition.”

They stood in silence.

“Good-night, Monsieur Zhone,” said Angelique.  “Don’t wait.”

“But I shall wait,” said Rice.

He had bowed and turned away to the currant hedge, and Angelique was entering her father’s lawn, when he came back impetuously.  He framed her cheeks in his hands, and she could feel rather than see the power of possession in his eyes.

“Angelique!” he said, and the word rushed through her like flame.  She recoiled, but Rice Jones was again in his father’s garden, moving like a shadow toward the house, before she stirred.  Whether it was the trick of the orator or the irrepressible outburst of passion, that appeal continued to ring in her ears and to thrill.

More disturbed than she had ever been before by the tactics of a lover, Angelique hurried up the back gallery steps, to find Peggy Morrison sitting in her chamber window, cross-legged, leaning over with one palm supporting a pointed chin.  The swinging sashes were pushed outward, and Peggy’s white gown hung down from the broad sill.

“Is that you, Peggy?” said Angelique.  “I thought you were dancing at Vigo’s this evening.”

“I thought you were, too.”

“Mama felt obliged to send our excuses, on account of going to sister’s baby.”

“How beautiful these large French families are!” observed Peggy; “some of them are always dying or teething, and the girls are slaves to their elders.”

“We must be beautiful,” said Angelique, “since two of the Morrisons have picked wives from us; and I assure you the Morrison babies give us the most trouble.”

“You might expect that.  I never saw any luck go with a red-headed Morrison.”

Angelique sat down on the sill, also, leaning against the side of the window.  The garden was becoming a void of dimness, through which a few fireflies sowed themselves.  Vapor blotted such stars as they might have seen from their perch, and the foliage of fruit trees stirred with a whisper of wind.