pencilled eyebrows and long lashes below, the faint red tinge that blushed with a kind of cold passion through the clear yellow skin of the cheek, the fulness of the red, voluptuous lips and the roundness of her perfect neck, gave her, even at fourteen, a barbaric and magnetic beauty, that startled the beholder like an unexpected drawing out of a jewelled sword.  Such a type could have sprung only from high Latin ancestry on the one side and—­we might venture—­Jaloff African on the other.  To these charms of person she added mental acuteness, conversational adroitness, concealed cunning, and noiseless but visible strength of will; and to these, that rarest of gifts in one of her tincture, the purity of true womanhood.

At fourteen a necessity which had been parleyed with for two years or more became imperative, and Aurore’s maid was taken from her.  Explanation is almost superfluous.  Aurore was to become a lady and her playmate a lady’s maid; but not her maid, because the maid had become, of the two, the ruling spirit.  It was a question of grave debate in the mind of M. De Grapion what disposition to make of her.

About this time the Grandissimes and De Grapions, through certain efforts of Honore’s father (since dead) were making some feeble pretences of mutual good feeling, and one of those Kentuckian dealers in corn and tobacco whose flatboat fleets were always drifting down the Mississippi, becoming one day M. De Grapion’s transient guest, accidentally mentioned a wish of Agricola Fusilier.  Agricola, it appeared, had commissioned him to buy the most beautiful lady’s maid that in his extended journeyings he might be able to find; he wanted to make her a gift to his niece, Honore’s sister.  The Kentuckian saw the demand met in Aurore’s playmate.  M. De Grapion would not sell her.  (Trade with a Grandissime?  Let them suspect he needed money?) No; but he would ask Agricola to accept the services of the waiting-maid for, say, ten years.  The Kentuckian accepted the proposition on the spot and it was by and by carried out.  She was never recalled to the Cannes Brulees, but in subsequent years received her freedom from her master, and in New Orleans became Palmyre la Philosophe, as they say in the corrupt French of the old Creoles, or Palmyre Philosophe, noted for her taste and skill as a hair-dresser, for the efficiency of her spells and the sagacity of her divinations, but most of all for the chaste austerity with which she practised the less baleful rites of the voudous.

“That’s the woman,” said Doctor Keene, rising to go, as he concluded the narrative,—­“that’s she, Palmyre Philosophe.  Now you get a view of the vastness of Agricole’s generosity; he tolerates her even though she does not present herself in the ‘strictly menial capacity.’  Reason why—­he’s afraid of her.”