"To what bitternesses grandpére had to return!"
"Aline!" Mme. De l'Isle called; "à table!"
"Yes, madame. Tell me--you, Mr. Chester--to your vision, how all that must have been."
"Paint in your sketch? Let me try. Maybe only because you tell the story, but maybe rather because it's so easy to see in you a reincarnation of your grand'mére--a Creole incarnation of that young 'Maud'--what I see plainest is she. I see her here, two thousand miles from home, with but three or four friends among a quarter of a million enemies. I see her on the day the city fell, looking up and down Royal Street from a balcony of the hotel, while from the great dome a few steps behind her the Union fleet could be seen, rounding the first two river bends below the harbor, engaging a last few Confederate guns at the old battle-ground, and coming on, with the Stars and Stripes at every peak. I see her----"
"She was beautiful, you know--grand'mére."
"Yes, I see her so, looking down from that balcony, awestruck, not fearstruck, on the people who in agonies of rage and terror fled the city by pairs and families, or in armed squads and unarmed mobs swept through the streets and up and down the levee, burning, breaking, and plundering."
"But that was the worst anybody did, you know."
"Oh, yes. We never knew till to-day's war came how humane that war was. It wasn't a war in which beauty, age, and infancy were hideous perils."
"Ah, never mind about that to-day. But about grandpère and grand'mère go on. Let me see how much you can imagine correctly, h'm?"
"Please, mademoiselle, no. Time has made you--through your father's eyes--they say you have them--an eye-witness. So next you see your grandpère getting back at last, by ship--go on."