Vignevielle.

"Oh, Père Jerome!" she exclaimed in the corrupt French of her caste,
meeting the little father on the street a few days later, "you told the
truth that day in your parlor. _Mo conné li à c't heure_. I know him
now; he is just what you called him."

"Why do you not make him _your_ banker, also, Madame Delphine?"

"I have done so this very day!" she replied, with more happiness in her
eyes than Père Jerome had ever before seen there.

"Madame Delphine," he said, his own eyes sparkling, "make _him_ your
daughter's guardian; for myself, being a priest, it would not be best;
but ask him; I believe he will not refuse you."

Madame Delphine's face grew still brighter as he spoke.

"It was in my mind," she said.

Yet to the timorous Madame Delphine many trifles became, one after
another, an impediment to the making of this proposal, and many weeks
elapsed before further delay was positively without excuse. But at
length, one day in May, 1822, in a small private office behind Monsieur
Vignevielle's banking-room,--he sitting beside a table, and she, more
timid and demure than ever, having just taken a chair by the door,--she
said, trying, with a little bashful laugh, to make the matter seem
unimportant, and yet with some tremor of voice:

"Miché Vignevielle, I bin maguing my will." (Having commenced their