“You are English, Messieurs—­yes?” she ventured.

“We were once!” cried Nick, “but we have changed, Mademoiselle.”

“Et quoi donc?” relapsing into her own language.

“Americans,” said he.  “Allow me to introduce to you the Honorable David Ritchie, whom you rejected a few moments ago.”

“Whom I rejected?” she exclaimed.

“Alas,” said Nick, with a commiserating glance at me, “he has the misfortune to be a lawyer.”

Mademoiselle shot at me the swiftest and shyest of glances, and turned to us once more her quivering shoulders.  There was a brief silence.

“Mademoiselle?” said Nick, taking a step on the garden path.

“Monsieur?” she answered, without so much as looking around.

“What, now, would you take this gentleman to be?” he asked with an insistence not to be denied.

Again she was shaken with laughter, and suddenly to my surprise she turned and looked full at me.

“In English, Monsieur, you call it—­a gallant?”

My face fairly tingled, and I heard Nick laughing with unseemly merriment.

“Ah, Mademoiselle,” he cried, “you are a judge of character, and you have read him perfectly.”

“Then I must leave you, Messieurs,” she answered, with her eyes in her lap.  But she made no move to go.

“You need have no fear of Mr. Ritchie, Mademoiselle,” answered Nick, instantly.  “I am here to protect you against his gallantry.”

This time Nick received the glance, and quailed before it.

“And who—­par exemple—­is to protect me against—­you, Monsieur?” she asked in the lowest of voices.

“You forget that I, too, am unprotected—­and vulnerable, Mademoiselle,” he answered.

Her face was hidden again, but not for long.

“How did you come?” she demanded presently.

“On air,” he answered, “for we saw you in New Orleans yesterday.”

“And—­why?”

“Need you ask, Mademoiselle?” said the rogue, and then, with more effrontery than ever, he began to sing:—­

         “’Je voudrais bien me marier,
          Je voudrais bien me marier,
          Mais j’ai grand’ peur de me tromper.’”

She rose, her sewing falling to the ground, and took a few startled steps towards us.

“Monsieur! you will be heard,” she cried.

“And put out of the Garden of Eden,” said Nick.

“I must leave you,” she said, with the quaintest of English pronunciation.

Yet she stood irresolute in the garden path, a picture against the dark green leaves and the flowers.  Her age might have been seventeen.  Her gown was of some soft and light material printed in buds of delicate color, her slim arms bare above the elbow.  She had the ivory complexion of the province, more delicate than I had yet seen, and beyond that I shall not attempt to describe her, save to add that she was such a strange mixture of innocence and ingenuousness and coquetry as I had not imagined.  Presently her gaze was fixed seriously on me.