Old Kaskaskia | Page 6

face was full of a mature sympathy unusual in girls. Maria had thought at first she would rather be alone on the gallery, but this reposeful and tender French girl at once became a necessity to her.
"Peggy," said Ang��lique, "I hear Jules Vigo inquiring for you in the hall."
"Then I shall take to the roof," responded Peggy.
"Have some regard for Jules."
"You may have, but I shan't. I will not dance with a kangaroo."
"Do you not promise dances ahead?" inquired Maria.
"No, our mothers do not permit that," answered Ang��lique. "It is sometimes best to sit still and look on."
"That means, Miss Jones," explained Peggy, "that she has set a fashion to give the rest of the girls a chance. I wouldn't be so mealy-mouthed about cutting them out. But Ang��lique has been ruined by waiting so much on her tante-gra'm��re. When you bear an old woman's temper from dawn till dusk, you soon forget you're a girl in your teens."
"Don't abuse the little tante-gra'm��re."
"She gets praise enough at our house. Mother says she's a discipline that keeps Ang��lique from growing vain. Thank Heaven, we don't need such discipline in our family."
"It is my father's grand-aunt," explained Ang��lique to Maria, "and when you see her, mademoiselle, you will be surprised to find how well she bears her hundred years, though she has not been out of her bed since I can remember. Mademoiselle, I hope I never shall be very old."
Maria gave Ang��lique the piercing stare which unconsciously belongs to large black eyes set in a hectic, nervous face.
"Would you die now?"
"I feel always," said the French girl, "that we stand facing the mystery every minute, and sometimes I should like to know it."
"Now hear that," said Peggy. "I'm no Catholic, but I will say for the mother superior that she never put that in your head at the convent. It is wicked to say you want to die."
"But I did not say it. The mystery of being without any body,--that is what I want to know. It is good to meditate on death."
"It isn't comfortable," said Peggy. "It makes me have chills down my back."
She glanced behind her through the many-paned open window into the dining-room. Three little girls and a boy were standing there, so close to the sill that their breath had touched Peggy's neck. They were Colonel Menard's motherless children. A black maid was with them, holding the youngest by the hand. They were whispering in French under cover of the music. French was the second mother tongue of every Kaskaskia girl, and Peggy heard what they said by merely taking her attention from her companions.
"I will get Jean Lozier to beat Monsieur Reece Zhone. Jean Lozier is such an obliging creature he will do anything I ask him."
"But, Odile," argued the boy, with some sense of equity, "she is not yet engaged to our family."
"And how shall we get her engaged to us if Monsieur Reece Zhone must hang around her? Papa says he is the most promising young man in the Territory. If I were a boy, Pierre Menard, I would do something with him."
"What would you do?"
"I would shoot him. He has duels."
"But my father might punish me for that."
"Very well, chicken-heart. Let Mademoiselle Saucier go, then. But I will tell you this: there is no one else in Kaskaskia that I will have for a second mother."
"Yes, we have all chosen her," owned Pierre, "but it seems to me papa ought to make the marriage."
"But she would not know we children were willing to have her. If you did something to stop Monsieur Zhone's courtship, she would then know."
"Why do you not go out on the gallery now and tell her we want her?" exclaimed Pierre. "The colonel says it is best to be straightforward in any matter of business."
"Pierre, it is plain to be seen that you do not know how to deal with young ladies. They like best to be fought over. It is not proper to tell her we are willing to have her. The way to do is to drive off the other suitors."
"But there are so many. Tante Isidore says all the young men in Kaskaskia and the officers left at Fort Chartres are her suitors. Monsieur Reece Zhone is the worst one, though. I might ask him to go out to papa's office with me to-night, but we shall be sent to bed directly after supper. Besides, here sits his sister who was carried out fainting."
"While he is in our house we are obliged to be polite to him," said Odile. "But if I were a boy, I would, some time, get on my pony and ride into Kaskaskia"--The conspiring went on in whispers. The children's heads bobbed nearer each other, so Peggy overheard no more.
It was the