He had left the Teche behind him on the east. And now a day breaks whose sunset finds him beyond the Vermilion River. He cannot go aside to the ex-governor's, over yonder on the right. He is making haste. This day his journey will end. His heart is light; he has thought out the whole matter now; he makes no doubt any longer that the story told him is true. And he knows now just what to do: this very sunset he will reach his goal; he goes to fill 'Thanase's voided place; to lay his own filial service at the feet of the widowed mother; to be a brother in the lost brother's place; and Zosephine?--why, she shall be her daughter, the same as though 'Thanase, not he, had won her. And thus, too, Zosephine shall have her own sweet preference--that preference which she had so often whispered to him--for a scholar rather than a soldier. Such is the plan, and Conscience has given her consent. The sun soars far overhead. It, too, makes haste. But the wasted, flushed, hungry-eyed traveller is putting the miles behind him. He questions none to-day that pass him or whom he overtakes; only bows, wipes his warm brow, and presses on across the prairie. Straight before him, though still far away, a small, white, wooden steeple rises from out a tuft of trees. It is _la chapelle_! The distance gets less and less. See! the afternoon sunlight strikes the roofs of a few unpainted cottages that have begun to show themselves at right and left of the chapel. And now he sees the green window-shutters of such as are not without them, and their copperas or indigo-dyed curtains blowing in and out. Nearer; nearer; here is a house, and yonder another, newly built. Carancro is reached. He enters a turfy, cattle-haunted lane between rose-hedges. In a garden on one side, and presently in another over the way, children whom he remembers--but grown like weeds since he saw them last--are at play; but when they stop and gaze at him, it is without a sign of recognition. Now he walks down the village street. How empty it seems! was it really always so? Still, yonder is a man he knows--and yonder a woman--but they disappear without seeing him. How familiar every thing is! There are the two shops abreast of the chapel, Marx's on this side, Lichtenstein's on that, their dingy false fronts covered with their same old huge rain-faded words of promise. Yonder, too, behind the blacksmith's shop, is the little schoolhouse, dirty, half-ruined, and closed--that is, wide-open and empty--it may be for lack of a teacher, or funds, or even of scholars. "It shall not be so," said the traveller to himself, "when _she_ and I"-- His steps grow slow. Yet here, not twenty paces before him, is the home of the cure. Ah! that is just the trouble. Shall he go here first? May he not push on and out once more upon the prairie and make himself known first of all to _her_? Stopping here first, will not the cure say tarry till to-morrow? His steps grow slower still.