"I never wanted you to get her, my dear boy; she is not your kind at all--nay, now, let me say it, since I have kept it unsaid so long and patiently. Do you imagine she could ever understand an unselfish life, or even one that tried to be unselfish? She makes an excellent Madame 'Thanase. 'Thanase is a good, vigorous, faithful, gentle animal, that knows how to graze and lie in the shade and get up and graze again. But you--it is not in you to know how poor a Madame Bonaventure she would have been; not now merely, but poorer and poorer as the years go by. "And so I say, do not go away. I know why you want to go; you want to run away from a haunting thought that some unlikely accident or other may leave Madame 'Thanase a widow, and you step into his big shoes. They would not fit. Do not go. That thing is not going to happen; and the way to get rid of the troublesome notion is to stay and see yourself outgrow it--and her." Bonaventure shook his head mournfully, but staid. From time to time Madame 'Thanase passed before his view in pursuit of her outdoor and indoor cares. But even when he came under her galerie roof he could see that she never doubted she had made the very best choice in all Carancro. And yet people knew--she knew--that Bonaventure not only enjoyed the acquaintance, but sometimes actually went from one place to another on the business, of the great ex-governor. Small matters they may have been, but, anyhow, just think! Sometimes as he so went or came he saw her squatting on a board at the edge of a _coolee_, her petticoat wrapped snugly around her limbs, and a limp sunbonnet hiding her nut-brown face, pounding her washing with a wooden paddle. She was her own housekeeper, chambermaid, cook, washerwoman, gooseherd, seamstress, nurse, and all the rest. Her floors, they said, were always _bien fourbis_ (well scrubbed); her beds were high, soft, snug, and covered with the white mesh of her own crochet-needle. He saw her the oftener because she worked much out on her low veranda. From that place she had a broad outlook upon the world, with 'Thanase in the foreground, at his toil, sometimes at his sport. His cares as a herder, _vacheur_,--_vache_, he called it,--were wherever his slender-horned herds might roam or his stallions lead their mares in search of the sweetest herbage; and when rains filled the _maraises_, and the cold nor'westers blew from Texas and the sod was spongy with much water, and he went out for feathered game, the numberless mallards, black ducks, gray ducks, teal--with sometimes the canvas-back--and the _poules-d'eau_--the water-hens and the rails, and the _cache-cache_--the snipe--were as likely to settle or rise just before his own house as elsewhere, and the most devastating shot that hurtled through those feathered multitudes was that sent by her husband--hers--her own--possessive case--belonging to her. She was proud of her property.