"I guess yeh apologized, didn't yeh?" said Mirabelle Marie, mildly.
"The young lady is dreaming," said the stranger, coolly, and he seated himself at the table. "Can you let me have something to eat at once, madame? I have a brother who resembles me; perhaps she saw him."
Bidiane grew so pale with wrath, and trembled so violently that Claudine ran to support her, and cried, "Tell us, Bidiane, what did you say to this bad man?"
Bidiane slightly recovered herself. "I said to him, 'Sir, I regret to tell you that you are lying.'"
The man at the table surveyed her in intense irritation. "I do not know where you come from, young woman," he said, hastily, "but you look Irish."
"And if I were not Acadien I would be Irish," she said, in a low voice, "for they also suffer for their country. Good-by, my aunt, I am going to Rose à Charlitte. I see you wish to keep this story-teller."
"Hole on, hole on," ejaculated Mirabelle Marie in distress. "Look here, sir, you've gut me in a fix, and you've gut to git me out of it."
"I shall not leave your house unless you tell me to do so," he said, in cool, quiet anger.
Bidiane stretched out her hands to him, and with tears in her eyes exclaimed, pleadingly, "Say only that you regret having slandered the Acadiens. I will forget that you put my people to shame before the English, for they all knew that I was coming to Clare. We will overlook it. Acadiens are not ungenerous, sir."