Angelique blushed in the dense twilight, her face taking childlike lines of apprehension. Her heart sank, and she suffered for him vicariously in advance. Her sensibility to other presences was so keen that she had once made it a subject of confession. "Father, I cannot feel any separateness from the people around me. Is this a sin?" "Believe that you have the saints and holy angels also in your company, and it will be no sin," answered Father Olivier. Though she was used to these queer demonstrations of men, her conscience always rebuked her for the number of offers she received. No sooner did she feel on terms of excellent friendliness with any man than he began to fondle her hand and announce himself her lover. It must be as her tante-gra'mere said, that girls had too much liberty in the Territory. Jules Vigo and Billy Edgar had both proposed in one day, and Angelique hid herself in the loom-house, feeling peculiarly humbled and ashamed to face the family, until her godmother had her almost forcibly brought back to the usual post. "I love you," said Rice Jones. "But please, no, Monsieur Zhone, no." "I love you," he repeated, compressing his lips. "Why 'no, Monsieur Zhone, no'?" "I do not know." Angelique drew her hand back and arranged her roses over and over, looking down at them in blind distress. "Is it Pierre Menard?" She glanced up at him reproachfully. "Oh, monsieur, it is only that I do not want"--She put silence in the place of words. "Monsieur," she then appealed, "why do men ask girls who do not want them to? If one appeared anxious, then it would be reasonable." "Not to men," said Rice, smiling. "We will have what is hard to be got. I shall have you, my Angelique. I will wait." "Monsieur," said Angelique, thinking of an obstacle which might block his way, "I am a Catholic, and you are not." "Priests don't frighten me. And Father Olivier is too sensible an old fellow to object to setting you in the car of my ambition." They stood in silence. "Good-night, Monsieur Zhone," said Angelique. "Don't wait." "But I shall wait," said Rice. He had bowed and turned away to the currant hedge, and Angelique was entering her father's lawn, when he came back impetuously. He framed her cheeks in his hands, and she could feel rather than see the power of possession in his eyes. "Angelique!" he said, and the word rushed through her like flame. She recoiled, but Rice Jones was again in his father's garden, moving like a shadow toward the house, before she stirred. Whether it was the trick of the orator or the irrepressible outburst of passion, that appeal continued to ring in her ears and to thrill. More disturbed than she had ever been before by the tactics of a lover, Angelique hurried up the back gallery steps, to find Peggy Morrison sitting in her chamber window, cross-legged, leaning over with one palm supporting a pointed chin. The swinging sashes were pushed outward, and Peggy's white gown hung down from the broad sill.