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Pere Jerome smiled also, and shrugged.

“To you, Madame Delphine, as you are placed, every white man in this country, on land or on water, is a pirate, and of all pirates, I think that one is, without doubt, the best.”

“Without doubt,” echoed Madame Delphine, wearily, still withdrawing backward. Pere Jerome stepped forward and opened the door.

The shadow of some one approaching it from without fell upon the threshold, and a man entered, dressed in dark blue cottonade, lifting from his head a fine Panama hat, and from a broad, smooth brow, fair where the hat had covered it, and dark below, gently stroking back his very soft, brown locks. Madame Delphine slightly started aside, while Pere Jerome reached silently, but eagerly, forward, grasped a larger hand than his own, and motioned its owner to a seat. Madame Delphine’s eyes ventured no higher than to discover that the shoes of the visitor were of white duck.

“Well, Pere Jerome,” she said, in a hurried undertone, “I am just going to say Hail Marys all the time till you find that out for me!”

“Well, I hope that will be soon, Madame Carraze. Good-day, Madame Carraze.”

And as she departed, the priest turned to the newcomer and extended both hands, saying, in the same familiar dialect in which he had been addressing the quadroone:

“Well-a-day, old playmate! After so many years!”

They sat down side by side, like husband and wife, the priest playing with the other’s hand, and talked of times and seasons past, often mentioning Evariste and often Jean.

Madame Delphine stopped short half-way home and returned to Pere Jerome’s. His entry door was wide open and the parlor door ajar. She passed through the one and with downcast eyes was standing at the other, her hand lifted to knock, when the door was drawn open and the white duck shoes passed out. She saw, besides, this time the blue cottonade suit.

“Yes,” the voice of Pere Jerome was saying, as his face appeared in the door–“Ah! Madame”–

“I lef’ my parasol,” said Madame Delphine, in English.

There was this quiet evidence of a defiant spirit hidden somewhere down under her general timidity, that, against a fierce conventional prohibition, she wore a bonnet instead of the turban of her caste, and carried a parasol.

Pere Jerome turned and brought it.

He made a motion in the direction in which the late visitor had disappeared.

“Madame Delphine, you saw dat man?”

“Not his face.”

“You couldn’ billieve me iv I tell you w’at dat man purpose to do!”

“Is dad so, Pere Jerome?”

“He’s goin’ to hopen a bank!”

“Ah!” said Madame Delphine, seeing she was expected to be astonished.

Pere Jerome evidently longed to tell something that was best kept secret; he repressed the impulse, but his heart had to say something. He threw forward one hand and looking pleasantly at Madame Delphine, with his lips dropped apart, clenched his extended hand and thrusting it toward the ground, said in a solemn undertone:

“He is God’s own banker, Madame Delphine.”

CHAPTER VII. MICHE VIGNEVIELLE.

Madame Delphine sold one of the corner lots of her property. She had almost no revenue, and now and then a piece had to go. As a consequence of the sale, she had a few large bank-notes sewed up in her petticoat, and one day–maybe a fortnight after her tearful interview with Pere Jerome–she found it necessary to get one of these changed into small money. She was in the Rue Toulouse, looking from one side to the other for a bank which was not in that street at all, when she noticed a small sign hanging above a door, bearing the name “Vignevielle.” She looked in. Pere Jerome had told her (when she had gone to him to ask where she should apply for change) that if she could only wait a few days, there would be a new concern opened in Toulouse Street,–it really seemed as if Vignevielle was the name, if she could judge; it looked to be, and it was, a private banker’s,–“U.L. Vignevielle’s,” according to a larger inscription which met her eyes as she ventured in. Behind the counter, exchanging some last words with a busy-mannered man outside, who, in withdrawing, seemed bent on running over Madame Delphine, stood the man in blue cottonade, whom she had met in Pere Jerome’s doorway. Now, for the first time, she saw his face, its strong, grave, human kindness shining softly on each and every bronzed feature. The recognition was mutual. He took pains to speak first, saying, in a re-assuring tone, and in the language he had last heard her use: “‘Ow I kin serve you, Madame?”