She was just passing seventeen—­that beautiful year when the heart of the maiden still beats quickly with the surprise of her new dominion, while with gentle dignity her brow accepts the holy coronation of womanhood.  The forehead and temples beneath her loosely bound hair were fair without paleness, and meek without languor.  She had the soft, lack-lustre beauty of the South; no ruddiness of coral, no waxen white, no pink of shell; no heavenly blue in the glance; but a face that seemed, in all its other beauties, only a tender accompaniment for the large, brown, melting eyes, where the openness of child-nature mingled dreamily with the sweet mysteries of maiden thought.  We say no color of shell on face or throat; but this was no deficiency, that which took its place being the warm, transparent tint of sculptured ivory.

This side doorway which led from Madame Delphine’s house into her garden was over-arched partly by an old remnant of vine-covered lattice, and partly by a crape-myrtle, against whose small, polished trunk leaned a rustic seat.  Here Madame Delphine and Olive loved to sit when the twilights were balmy or the moon was bright.

“Cherie,” said Madame Delphine on one of those evenings, “why do you dream so much?”

She spoke in the patois most natural to her, and which her daughter had easily learned.

The girl turned her face to her mother, and smiled, then dropped her glance to the hands in her own lap; which were listlessly handling the end of a ribbon.  The mother looked at her with fond solicitude.  Her dress was white again; this was but one night since that in which Monsieur Vignevielle had seen her at the bush of night-jasmine.  He had not been discovered, but had gone away, shutting the gate, and leaving it as he had found it.

Her head was uncovered.  Its plaited masses, quite black in the moonlight, hung down and coiled upon the bench, by her side.  Her chaste drapery was of that revived classic order which the world of fashion was again laying aside to re-assume the medaeval bondage of the staylace; for New Orleans was behind the fashionable world, and Madame Delphine and her daughter were behind New Orleans.  A delicate scarf, pale blue, of lightly netted worsted, fell from either shoulder down beside her hands.  The look that was bent upon her changed perforce to one of gentle admiration.  She seemed the goddess of the garden.

Olive glanced up.  Madame Delphine was not prepared for the movement, and on that account repeated her question: 

“What are you thinking about?”

The dreamer took the hand that was laid upon hers between her own palms, bowed her head, and gave them a soft kiss.

The mother submitted.  Wherefore, in the silence which followed, a daughter’s conscience felt the burden of having withheld an answer, and Olive presently said, as the pair sat looking up into the sky: 

“I was thinking of Pere Jerome’s sermon.”