What a curious, varied life hers had been! And now it flowed on tranquilly. Would it always be this way? Uncle Gaspard wanted her to marry, but who was there to suit them both? The pretty mystery, not quite a smile, but that always made her face enchanting, passed over it now. This one and that one had been mentioned, and she had scouted them with a dainty insistence that always amused him, though he would argue about their best points as if he was in sober earnest.
“Sometimes I think you really want to get rid of me, Uncle Gaspard,” she would retort, with an air of being provoked. “And what if I should never like anybody? I wonder if, after all, when I am old, say thirty, perhaps, I would have to go to Quebec and enter a convent, like Marie Guion?”
“Thirty! Well, you are a good way from that! And I am a good way past it, and you won’t hear to my being old.”
Then she would laugh and put loving arms about his neck, and he would think he did not mind the waiting. If it was God’s will, the thing he wanted would come about; but if it was not, one could not go against the great All-Father, whose right it was to give or to deny.
But he remarked that she had grown to like talking over the times when André Valbonais had come to her rescue and that of Wawataysee.
“And I would get hungry and tired and cold, and feel afraid of wild animals in the forest. I was so little, you know, and not wise and patient like Wawataysee. And I used to cry for you. André was very good not to get cross and scold, now was he not?”
“Oh, my little one, I never forget that I owe him a great deal. And I am glad he is prospering so well.”
“But suppose he should want to stay in New Orleans? It is so much gayer and finer than this little St. Louis. Our Place d’Arms is nothing compared to that handsome plaza, Barbe says. And the women dress so much, and there is the beautiful church, and the school for girls, and a theatre, and music everywhere on the balconies. Perhaps he will never come back.”
Did she sigh a little over her own prediction?
“We can go there some day——”