A toss of the head dismissed the matter and any doubts pertaining thereto, while her thoughts flew from past to present, as a fortress on a car, its occupants armed with pellets of festival conflict, drove by amid peals of laughter. Absorbed in this scene of merriment, Susan forgot her haste, and kept her apostolic half waiting at the rendezvous with the patience of a Jacob tarrying for a Rachel. But when she did finally appear, with hat not perfectly poised, her hair in a pretty disarray, she looked so waywardly charming, he forgave her on the spot, and the lamb led the stern shepherd with a crook from Eve’s apple tree.
“As thin as a lath and gaunt as a ghost!” repeated Saint-Prosper, as the fair penitent vanished in a whirl of gaiety. “Susan always was frank.”
Smiling somewhat bitterly, he paused long enough to light a cigar, but it went out in his fingers as he strolled mechanically toward the wharves, through the gardens of a familiar square, where the wheezing of the distant steamers and the echoes of the cathedral clock marked the hours of pleasure or pain to-day as it had tolled them off yesterday. Beyond the pale 474 of the orange trees with their golden wealth, the drays were rumbling in the streets and there were the same signs of busy traffic––for the carnival had not yet become a legal holiday––that he had observed when the strollers had reached the city and made their way to the St. Charles. He saw her anew, pale and thoughtful, leaning on the rail of the steamer looking toward the city, where events, undreamed of, were to follow thick and fast. He saw her, a slender figure, earnest, self-possessed, enter the city gates, unheralded, unknown. He saw her as he had known her in the wilderness––not as fancy might now depict her, the daughter of a marquis––a strolling player, and as such he loved best to think of her.
Arising out of his physical weakness and the period of inaction following the treaty of peace, he experienced a sudden homesickness for his native land; a desire to re-visit familiar scenes, to breathe the sweet air of the country, where his boyhood had been passed, to listen to the thunder of the boulevards, to watch the endless, sad-joyful processions.
Not far distant from the blossoming, redolent square was the office of the Trans-Atlantic Steamship Company, where a clerk, with a spray of jessamine in his coat, bent cordially toward Saint-Prosper as the latter entered, and, approaching the desk, inquired:
“The Dauphin is advertised to sail to-morrow for France?”
“Yes, sir; at twelve o’clock noon.”
“Book me for a berth. Ernest Saint-Prosper,” he added, in answer to the other’s questioning look.
“Very good, sir. Would you like some labels for your baggage? Where shall we send for it? The St. Charles? Very well, sir. Are you going to the tableaux to-night?” he continued, with hospitable interest in one whom he rightly conceived a stranger in the city. “They say it will be the fashionable event. Good-day.” As the prospective passenger paid for and received his ticket. “A pleasant voyage! The Dauphin is a new ship and should cross in three weeks––barring bad weather! Don’t forget the tableaux. Everybody will be there.”