The others gone, Alexina, King William and the Captain sat on the porch. The girl who was on the step reached up and put a hand on the locket swinging from the Captain’s fob. “May I?” she asked, “I used to, often, you know.”
The Captain slipped the watch out and handed it to her, the rest depending, and she opened the locket, a large, thin, plain gold affair. “This,” she said, bending over it, then looking up at the Captain archly, “this is Julie Piquet, your mother, wife of Aristide Leroy, refugee and Girondist.”
She recited it like a child proud of knowing its lesson, then regarded him out of the corners of her eyes, laughing.
There answered the faintest flicker of a smile somewhere in the old Roman face.
The girl returned to the study of the dark beauty on the ivory again, its curly tresses fillet bound, its snowy breasts the more revealed than hidden by the short-waisted, diaphanous drapery.
“And because it had been your father’s locket, with you and your mother in it, Mrs. Leroy wouldn’t let you change it to put her in; and so this on the other side is you, young Georges Gautier Hippolyte Leroy—”
“Written G. Leroy in general,” interpolated the gentleman’s son.
“And this is how you looked at twenty, dark and rosy-cheeked, with a handsome aquiline nose. You never were democratic, for all your grand pose at being; do you believe he was?” This to King. “Look at him here; if ever there was an inborn, inbred aristocratic son of a revolutionist—”
“He barricaded the streets of Paris with his fellow-students in his turn, don’t forget,” said King.
“Where his papa had sent him for a more cosmopolitan knowledge of life than Louisville could afford,” supplemented Alexina gaily.