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The noble soldier glowed, and bowed his acknowledgments in a dubious, half remonstrative way, as if Madame might be producing material for her next confession, as, indeed, she diligently was doing; but she went straight on once more, as a surgeon would.

“But that other lady said: ‘No, Madame, no, ladies, but I am going to tell you why Monsieur, the General, is angry with his son.’ ‘Very well, why?’–‘Why? It is just–because–he is–a little man!'”

General Villivicencio stood straight up.

“Ah! mon ami,” cried the lady, rising excitedly, “I have wounded you and made you angry, with my silly revelations. Pardon me, my friend. Those were foolish girls, and, anyhow, they admired you. They said you looked glorious–grand–at the head of the procession.”

Now, all at once, the General felt the tremendous fatigues of the day; there was a wild, swimming, whirling sensation in his head that forced him to let his eyelids sink down; yet, just there, in the midst of his painful bewilderment, he realized with ecstatic complacency that the most martial-looking man in Louisiana was standing in his spurs with the hand of Louisiana’s queenliest woman laid tenderly on his arm.

“I am a wretched tattler!” said she.

“Ah! no, Madame, you are my dearest friend, yes.’

“Well, anyhow, I called them fools. ‘Ah! innocent creatures,’ I said, ‘think you a man of his sense and goodness, giving his thousands to the sick and afflicted, will cease to love his only son because he is not big like a horse or quarrelsome like a dog? No, ladies, there is a great reason which none of you know.’ ‘Well, well,’ they cried, ‘tell it; he has need of a very good reason; tell it now.’ ‘My ladies,’ I said, ‘I must not’–for, General, for all the world I knew not a reason why you should be angry against your son; you know, General, you have never told me.”

The beauty again laid her hand on his arm and gazed, with round-eyed simplicity, into his sombre countenance. For an instant her witchery had almost conquered.

“Nay, Madame, some day I shall tell you; I have more than one burden here. But let me ask you to be seated, for I have a question, also, for you, which I have longed to ask. It lies heavily upon my heart; I must ask it now. A matter of so great importance”–

Madame’s little brown aunt gave a faint cough from a dim corner of the room.

“‘Tis a beautiful night,” she remarked, and stepped out on the balcony.

Then the General asked his question. It was a very long question, or, maybe, repeated twice or thrice; for it was fully ten minutes before he moved out of the room, saying good-evening.

Ah! old General Villivicencio. The most martial-looking man in Louisiana! But what would the people, the people who cheered in the morning, have said, to see the fair Queen Delicieuse at the top of the stair, sweetly bowing you down into the starlight,–humbled, crestfallen, rejected!

The campaign opened. The Villivicencio ticket was read in French and English with the very different sentiments already noted. In the Exchange, about the courts, among the “banks,” there was lively talking concerning its intrinsic excellence and extrinsic chances. The young gentlemen who stood about the doors of the so-called “coffee-houses” talked with a frantic energy alarming to any stranger, and just when you would have expected to see them jump and bite large mouthfuls out of each other’s face, they would turn and enter the door, talking on in the same furious manner, and, walking up to the bar, click their glasses to the success of the Villivicencio ticket. Sundry swarthy and wrinkled remnants of an earlier generation were still more enthusiastic. There was to be a happy renaissance; a purging out of Yankee ideas; a blessed home-coming of those good old Bourbon morals and manners which Yankee notions had expatriated. In the cheerfulness of their anticipations they even went the length of throwing their feet high in air, thus indicating how the Villivicencio ticket was going to give “doze Americains” the kick under the nose.