And she rattles on in French speech, explaining how it was,--how they walked together in those sunny noontides at Ashfield; and taking a girlish pride in the easy adaptation of her language to forms which her father must know so well, she rounds off a little torrent of swift narrative with a piquant, coquettish look, and says,-- "_N'est ce pas, que j'y suis, mon père?_" "_Parfaitement, ma chère_," says the father, and drops an admiring kiss upon the glowing cheeks of Adèle. But the shade of anxiety has not passed from the face of Maverick. "This Madame Arles, Adèle,--has she been long in the country?" "I don't know, papa; yet it must be some years; she speaks English passably well." "And she has told you, I suppose, very much about the people among whom you were born, Adèle?" "Not much, papa,--and never anything about herself or her history; yet I have been so curious!" "Don't be too curious, _petite_; you might learn only of badness." "Not badness, I am very, very sure, papa!" Adèle is sitting on the arm of his chair, fondling those sparse locks of his, sprinkled with gray. It is a wholly new sensation for him; charming, doubtless; but even under the caresses of this daughter, of whom he has reason to be proud, anxious thoughts crowd upon him. Are not our deepest loves measured, after all, by the depth of the accompanying solicitude? The Doctor is met very warmly by Maverick, and feels something like a revival of the glow of his youthful days as he takes his hand; and yet they are wider apart by far than when they met in the life-time of Rachel. Both feel it; they have travelled widely divergent roads, these last twenty years. The Doctor is satisfied by the bearing and talk of Maverick (whatever kindness may lie in it) that his worldliness is more engrossing and decided than ever. And Maverick, on his part, scrutinizing, carelessly, but unerringly, that embarrassed country manner of the parson's, that stark linen in which he is arrayed by the foresight of the spinster sister, and the constraint of his speech, is sure that his old friend more than ever bounds his thought by the duties of his sacred office.