"They are right!" the doctor persisted, in response to Frowenfeld's
puzzled look. "The people here have got to be particular. However, that
is not what we were talking about. Quadroon balls are not to be
mentioned in connection. Those ladies--" He addressed himself to the
resuscitation of his cigar. "Singular people in this country," he
resumed; but his cigar would not revive. He was a poor story-teller. To
Frowenfeld--as it would have been to any one, except a Creole or the
most thoroughly Creoleized Américain--his narrative, when it was done,
was little more than a thick mist of strange names, places and events;
yet there shone a light of romance upon it that filled it with color and
populated it with phantoms. Frowenfeld's interest rose--was allured into
this mist--and there was left befogged. As a physician, Doctor Keene
thus accomplished his end,--the mental diversion of his late
patient,--for in the midst of the mist Frowenfeld encountered and
grappled a problem of human life in Creole type, the possible
correlations of whose quantities we shall presently find him revolving
in a studious and sympathetic mind, as the poet of to-day ponders the

"Flower in the crannied wall."

The quantities in that problem were the ancestral--the maternal--roots
of those two rival and hostile families whose descendants--some brave,
others fair--we find unwittingly thrown together at the ball, and with
whom we are shortly to have the honor of an unmasked acquaintance.




CHAPTER IV