“Don’t abuse the little tante-gra’mere.”

“She gets praise enough at our house.  Mother says she’s a discipline that keeps Angelique from growing vain.  Thank Heaven, we don’t need such discipline in our family.”

“It is my father’s grand-aunt,” explained Angelique to Maria, “and when you see her, mademoiselle, you will be surprised to find how well she bears her hundred years, though she has not been out of her bed since I can remember.  Mademoiselle, I hope I never shall be very old.”

Maria gave Angelique the piercing stare which unconsciously belongs to large black eyes set in a hectic, nervous face.

“Would you die now?”

“I feel always,” said the French girl, “that we stand facing the mystery every minute, and sometimes I should like to know it.”

“Now hear that,” said Peggy.  “I’m no Catholic, but I will say for the mother superior that she never put that in your head at the convent.  It is wicked to say you want to die.”

“But I did not say it.  The mystery of being without any body,—­that is what I want to know.  It is good to meditate on death.”

“It isn’t comfortable,” said Peggy.  “It makes me have chills down my back.”

She glanced behind her through the many-paned open window into the dining-room.  Three little girls and a boy were standing there, so close to the sill that their breath had touched Peggy’s neck.  They were Colonel Menard’s motherless children.  A black maid was with them, holding the youngest by the hand.  They were whispering in French under cover of the music.  French was the second mother tongue of every Kaskaskia girl, and Peggy heard what they said by merely taking her attention from her companions.

“I will get Jean Lozier to beat Monsieur Reece Zhone.  Jean Lozier is such an obliging creature he will do anything I ask him.”

“But, Odile,” argued the boy, with some sense of equity, “she is not yet engaged to our family.”

“And how shall we get her engaged to us if Monsieur Reece Zhone must hang around her?  Papa says he is the most promising young man in the Territory.  If I were a boy, Pierre Menard, I would do something with him.”

“What would you do?”

“I would shoot him.  He has duels.”

“But my father might punish me for that.”

“Very well, chicken-heart.  Let Mademoiselle Saucier go, then.  But I will tell you this:  there is no one else in Kaskaskia that I will have for a second mother.”

“Yes, we have all chosen her,” owned Pierre, “but it seems to me papa ought to make the marriage.”

“But she would not know we children were willing to have her.  If you did something to stop Monsieur Zhone’s courtship, she would then know.”

“Why do you not go out on the gallery now and tell her we want her?” exclaimed Pierre.  “The colonel says it is best to be straightforward in any matter of business.”