Stop; they can spare me here a moment; I will take you to the Marquise: she is in the next room....

Behold," said he, as he entered the presence of his marchioness, "the little maid who will not marry!" The Marquise was as cold and hard-hearted as the Marquis was loose and kind; but we need not recount the slow tortures of the _fille a la cassette's_ second verbal temptation.

The colony had to have soldiers, she was given to understand, and the soldiers must have wives.

"Why, I am a soldier's wife, myself!" said the gorgeously attired lady, laying her hand upon the governor-general's epaulet.

She explained, further, that he was rather softhearted, while she was a business woman; also that the royal commissary's rolls did not comprehend such a thing as a spinster, and--incidentally--that living by principle was rather out of fashion in the province just then.
After she had offered much torment of this sort, a definite notion seemed to take her; she turned her lord by a touch of the elbow, and exchanged two or three business-like whispers with him at a window overlooking the Levee.
"Fillette," she said, returning, "you are going to live on the sea-coast.