"Yes. And he kept that place--how long?"
"Always, till he passed, he and mamma; mamma first, he two years avter. Ad the last he said to me--we chanced to be talking in Englizh--'I've lived the quiet life. If I must go I can go quietly.'
"'And still,' I said, 'if your life had been as stormy as grandpére's you'd have been always for the right, and ad the last content, I think.'
"'Yes,' he said, 'I believe I never ran away from a storm, while ad the same time I never ran avter one.' And then he said something I wrote down the same night in the fear I might sometime partly forget it."
"Have you it with you, now, here?" She showed a bit of paper, holding it low for him to read as she retained it:
On the side of the right all the storms of life--all the storms of the world--are for the perfection of the quiet life--the active-quiet life--to build it stronger, wider, finer, higher, than is possible for the stormy life to be. Whether for each man or for the nations, the stormy life is but the means; the active-quiet life, without decay of character in man or nation but with growth forever--that is the end.
The pair exchanged a look. "Thank you," murmured Chester, and presently added: "So you were left with your two aunts. Then what?"
"I'll tell you. But"---the Creole accent faded out--"we must not disappoint the De l'Isles, nor those others, we must----"
"I see; we must notice where we're going and give and take our share of the joy."
"We mustn't be as if reading the morning paper, h'm? I think 'tis for you they've come this way instead of going on those smooth shell-roads between the city and the lake." The two cars had come up through old "Carrollton," where the Mississippi, sweeping down from Nine-Mile Point, had been gnawing inland for something like a century, in spite of all man's engineering could pile against it, and now were out on the levee road and half round the bend above.