For answer, Robert only hummed the refrain of an old love-song,—
"Ai mé! sans elle il me faut mourir."
The hot weather had come, and the city had suddenly bloomed out with white-draped women. On the wide galleries, of an evening, one saw groups of dark-eyed Creole girls looking like great creamy flowers in their transparent garments of feathery white. In the streets the heavy featured negresses on their way from market strode along with their baskets of fruit and vegetables, clad in scant white raiment, which made their faces blacker than ever by contrast. In the churches the worshippers at the early Mass looked like so many white-winged angels kneeling at their devotions, their pinions folded about them.
In the gardens of the Spanish fort, the West End, the Jockey Club, white vestments glanced through the trees and shrubbery. At nightfall on the waters of Pontchartrain the same snowy figures were reflected, leaning from sloop and shallop, letting white hands trail in the cool water. The houses too had taken on their summer dress. A deeper twilight reigned in the high-ceiled drawing-rooms furnished in cool linens and carpeted with straw mattings. The latticed verandas were the favorite places of
