She dropped her eyes.
"I cannot help it. I never knew till yesterday," meekly.
"And your guardian," I indicated the French minister with a slight nod in his direction, "thinks it great presumption for a plain Yankee gentleman to be talking on such familiar terms with a princess of the blood, and is coming in a few minutes to put a stop to it."
She looked at the minister quickly with a haughty turn of the head and a flashing glance, but in a moment she turned back to me with a smile curling her scarlet lips and a humorous twinkle in her eye.
"He would never dare," she said. "He is a good Citizen of the Republic."
"Nevertheless he will dare," I insisted. "I see it in his eye; so first tell me quickly how you got here, and when and where you are going."
"Your boat was hardly out of sight, Monsieur," she answered, "when another came up the river direct from St. Louis with Monsieur and Madame Cerré aboard. They brought letters from my guardian directing me to go on with them to Washington (where they were going to see the Spanish minister about some trouble they had had with Americans—concerning peltries, I think, and land, perhaps), and they would place me in the French minister's care. I did not expect to find you here, for we were a whole day behind you; but we traveled rapidly."
"And I was delayed," I said. "But when and how are you to get to Paris? With the Livingstons?"
"No; Citizen Pichon says they sailed this week. But he tells me, what is not generally known, that your government is about to send a special envoy to France concerning New Orleans—a Monsieur Monroe; and Monsieur Pichon has arranged that I shall go with him."
"Do you know when?" I asked hastily, for I saw the President moving toward us with the Marquis de Casa Yrujo, and I was quite sure that meant an end to all conversation.