Ah, Claude! what are you thinking of? Has not your new partner in business told you they are here? No, not a word of it. "That'll keep till I get back," Mr. Tarbox had said to himself; and such shrewdness was probably not so ungenerous, after all. "If you want a thing done well, do it yourself," he said one evening to a man who could not make out what he was driving at; and later Mr. Tarbox added to himself, "The man that flies the kite must hold the thread." And so he kept his counsel. But that does not explain. For we remember that Claude already knew that Marguerite was in the city, at least had her own mother's word for it. Here, weeks had passed. New Orleans is not so large; its active centre is very small. Even by accident, on the street, Canal Street especially, he should have seen her time and again. And he did not; at any rate not to know it. She really kept very busy indoors; and in other doors so did he. More than that, there was his father. When the two first came to the city St. Pierre endured the town for a week. But it was martyrdom, doing it. Claude saw this. Mr. Tarbox was with him the latter part of the week. He saw it. He gave his suggestive mind to it for one night. The next day St. Pierre and he wandered off in street-cars and on foot, and by the time the sun went down again a new provision had been made. At about ninety minutes' jaunt from the city's centre, up the river, and on its farther shore, near where the old "Company Canal" runs from a lock in the river bank, back through the swamps and into the Baratarian lakes, St. Pierre had bought with his lifetime savings a neat house and fair-sized orangery. No fields? None: "You see, bom-bye [by-and-by] Claude git doze new mash-in' all right, he go to ingineerin' agin, and him and you [Tarbox] be takin' some cawntrac' for buil' levee or break up old steamboat, or raise somet'in' what been sunk, or somet'in' dat way. And den he certain' want somboddie to boss gang o' fellows. And den he say, 'Papa, I want you.' And den I say how I got fifty arpent' [42 acres] rice in field. And den he say, 'How I goin' do widout you?' And den dare be fifty arpent' rice gone!" No, no fields.