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You forget, Laronde, that we are free agents as well as sinful and foolish, more or less, so that there is legitimate room for anxiety, which only becomes evil when we give way to it, or when it goes the length of questioning the love, wisdom, and power of the Creator!" "All mystery, all mystery, Sommers; you are only theorising about what you do not, cannot, know anything.
"Your little girl is never `too' anything!" replied the middy to Hugh, with much gravity. The ex-Bagnio slave smiled, but whether at the reply or at the rushing Frenchman we cannot tell. When Laronde reached his room he found Peter the Great there, on his knees, packing a small valise. "Hallo! Peter, what are you doing? I want that." "Yes, Eddard, I know dat. Das why I's packin'."
"Because," replied Laronde bitterly, "if there was a God He could not stand by and see me suffering such prolonged and awful misery." "If, instead of misery, you had been placed during the last twelve years in supreme felicity, would you have believed in a God?" asked Sommers. Laronde was silent.
Whatever may be true of your modern forty-mile-an-hour iron horse, there can be no question that the ten-mile-an-hour of those days, behind a spanking team with clattering wheels, and swaying springs, and cracking whip, and sounding horn, felt uncommonly swift and satisfactory. Laronde shut his eyes and enjoyed it at first. But the strength engendered by excitement soon began to fail.
They had heard of a dressmaker who employed a girl or woman named Laronde in the West End, so I hunted her up with rather sanguine expectations, but she turned out to be a girl of sixteen, dark instead of fair, and unmarried! But again I ask, mother, what news, for I see by your face that you have something to tell me. That is a letter from Minnie, is it not?"
"Laronde," said the merchant impressively, "I wonder to hear you, who have a daughter of your own, suggest that I could fail to recognise my Hester in any disguise. Why, if she were to paint her face scarlet and her nose pea-green I'd see through it by the beautiful shape of the features and the sweet expression of her face." "Forgive me, Monsieur Sommers, I doubt not that you would.
"That's quite true, Laronde, though I must confess that I paid no attention to her face when she was approaching me, and after she dropped the biscuits in my lap she was so far past that I only saw a bit of her black cheek and her back, which latter, you know, was enveloped from head to foot in that loose blue cotton thing which does not tell much about the wearer."
It is sufficient to note the result. In the course of a short time after she had entered the bower, a loud shout was heard, and next moment Laronde was seen rushing towards the house with a flushed countenance and the vigour of an athlete! "My little girl has been too precipitate, I fear," remarked Hugh Sommers to the middy.
His taking advantage of the opportunity to free Edouard Laronde was the result of a sudden inspiration a mere afterthought!
Laronde obtained a situation as French master in an academy not far off, and his wife and daughter soon gave evidence that joy is indeed a wonderful medicine! As for George Foster himself, he rose to the top of his profession. How could it be otherwise with such an experience and such a wife?
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