"Well!" said St. Pierre after a long silence. Claude and he were out on the swollen Mississippi pulling with steady leisure for the home-side shore, their skiff pointed half to and half from the boiling current. The sun was gone; a purple dusk wrapped either low bank; a steamboat that had passed up stream was now, at the turning of the bend, only a cluster of soft red lights; Venus began to make a faint silvery pathway across the waters. St. Pierre had the forward seat, at Claude's back. The father looked with fond perplexity at the strong young shoulders swinging silently with his own, forward and backward in slow, monotonous strokes, and said again: "Well? Whass matter? Look like cat got yo' tongue. Makin' new mash-in?" Then in a low dissatisfied tone--"I reckon somet'in' mighty curious." He repeated the last three words in the Acadian speech: "Tcheuque-chose bien tchurieux." "Yass," replied the son, "mighty strange. I tell you when we come at home." He told all. Recounted all his heart's longings, all his dreams, every least pang of self-reproach, the idealization of Marguerite, and the finding of that ideal incarnated in one who was and yet seemed not to be, or rather seemed to be and yet was not, Marguerite. And then he went on to re-assure his father that this could never mean marriage, never mean the father's supplanting. A man could worship what he could never hope to possess. He would rather worship this than win such kind as he would dare woo. He said all these things in a very quiet way, with now and then a silent pause, and now and then a calm, self-contained tone in resuming; yet his sentences were often disconnected, and often were half soliloquy. Such were the only betrayals of emotion on either side until Claude began to treat--in the words just given--his father's own heart interests; then the father's eyes stood brimming full. But St. Pierre did not speak. From the first he had listened in silence and he offered no interruption until at length Claude came to that part about the object of his regard being so far, so utterly, beyond his reach. Then-- "Stop! Dass all foolishness! You want her? You kin have her!" "Ah, papa! you dawn't awnstand! What I am?" "Ah, bah! What anybody is? What she is? She invanted bigger mash-in dan you? a mo' better corn-stubbl' destroyer and plant-corner?" He meant corn-planter. "She invant a more handier doubl'-action pea-vine rake? What she done mak' her so gran'? Naw, sir! She look fine in de face, yass; and dass all you know. Well, dass all right; dass de 'Cajun way--pick 'em out by face. You begin 'Cajun way, for why you dawn't finish 'Cajun way? All you got do, you git good saddle-hoss and ride. Bom-bye you see her, you ride behind her till you find where her daddy livin' at. Den you ride pas' yondah every day till fo', five days, and den you see de ole man come scrape friend wid you. Den he hass you drop round, and fus' t'ing you know--_adjieu la calege!_"