“I am positive of it,” I answered, “and for the sake of those who are engaged in it, it is mercifully best that it should not.  The day may come,” I added, for the sake of leading her away, “when Kentucky will be strong enough to overrun Louisiana.  But not now.”

She turned to me with a trace of her former fierceness.

“Why are you in New Orleans?” she demanded.

A sudden resolution came to me then.

“To bring you back with me to Kentucky,” I answered.  She shook her head sadly, but I continued:  “I have more to say.  I am convinced that neither Nick nor you will be happy until you are mother and son again.  You have both been wanderers long enough.”

Once more she turned away and fell into a revery.  Over the housetop, from across the street, came the gay music of the fiddler.  Mrs. Temple laid her hand gently on my shoulder.

“My dear,” she said, smiling, “I could not live for the journey.”

“You must live for it,” I answered.  “You have the will.  You must live for it, for his sake.”

She shook her head, and smiled at me with a courage which was the crown of her sufferings.

“You are talking nonsense, David,” she said; “it is not like you.  Come,” she said, rising with something of her old manner, “I must show you what I have been doing all these years.  You must admire my garden.”

I followed her, marvelling, along the shell path, and there came unbidden to my mind the garden at Temple Bow, where she had once been wont to sit, tormenting Mr. Mason or bending to the tale of Harry Riddle’s love.  Little she cared for flowers in those days, and now they had become her life.  With such thoughts in my mind, I listened unheeding to her talk.  The place was formerly occupied by a shiftless fellow, a tailor; and the court, now a paradise, had been a rubbish heap.  That orange tree which shaded the uneven doorway of the kitchen she had found here.  Figs, pomegranates, magnolias; the camellias dazzling in their purity; the blood-red oleanders; the pink roses that hid the crumbling adobe and climbed even to the sloping tiles,—­all these had been set out and cared for with her own hands.  Ay, and the fragrant bed of yellow jasmine over which she lingered,—­Antoinette’s favorite flower.

Antoinette’s flowers that she wore in her hair!  In her letters Mrs. Temple had never mentioned Antoinette, and now she read the question (perchance purposely put there) in my eyes.  Her voice faltered sadly.  Scarce a week had she been in the house before Antoinette had found her.

“I—­I sent the girl away, David.  She came without Monsieur de St. Gre’s knowledge, without his consent.  It is natural that he thinks me—­I will not say what.  I sent Antoinette away.  She clung to me, she would not go, and I had to be—­cruel.  It is one of the things which make the nights long—­so long.  My sins have made her life unhappy.”

“And you hear of her?  She is not married?” I asked.