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Updated: June 12, 2025
You should have kept the Indian woman and made her tell her story." "She disappeared so quickly, and Madame Bellestre was so good and kind. The orphan of Le bon Dieu, she called her. Yes, I will see the good father." "And I will have a talk with him when Delisse goes to confession." Madame Ganeau gave a soft, relieved sigh. "My duty is done, almost, to my children.
Restore me to my home!" For it seemed, amid these rough savages, she sorely needed a mother's tender care. And she thought now there had been no loving woman in her life save Pani. Madame Bellestre had petted her, but she had lost her out of her life so soon.
In a slow, phlegmatic fashion she used to go over her past life, raising up from their graves, as it were, Madame de Longueil, Madame Bellestre, and then Monsieur, though he never came from the shadowy grave, but a garden that bore strange fruit, and where it was summer all the year round.
"Here is the necklet and the little ring and the paper with her name. Madame Bellestre placed these in my hand some time before she died." The chain was slender and of gold, the locket small; inside two painted miniatures but very diminutive, and both of them young. One would hardly be able to identify a middle aged person from them. There was no mark or initials, save an undecipherable monogram.
"Oh, little one! It seemed as if thou wert gone forever!" Jeanne hugged her foster mother in a transport of joy and affection. What if Pani had not cared for her all these years? There were some orphan children in the town bound out for servants. To be sure, there had been M. Bellestre. Pani did not receive the Sieur Angelot very graciously.
She came and stretching up clasped her arms about the woman's neck as she had in her babyhood. "And I like to go to school to the master." "M. Bellestre counts this way, that you were three years old when you came to Detroit. That was nine years ago. And that you are twelve now. So there are four years " "It looks a long while, but the past does not seem so.
One was that she had Indian blood in her veins, and " here Madame Fleury lowered her voice almost to a whisper, "and that Madame Bellestre, who was very much of the haute noblesse, should be so ready to take in a strange child, and that M. Bellestre should keep his sort of guardianship over her and provide for her. Some of the talk comes back to me.
To you, Pani, is given the house and a sum of money each year. To the child is left a yearly portion until she is sixteen, then, if she becomes a Catholic and chooses the lot of a sister, it ceases. Otherwise it is continued until she is married, when she is given a sum for a dowry. And at your death your income reverts to the Bellestre estate."
"I am not going to marry, you know. After all, maybe when I get old I will be a sister. It won't be hard to wear a black gown then. But I shall wait until I am very old. Pani, did you ever dream of what might happen to you?" "The good God sends what is best for us, child." "But Monsieur Bellestre might come. And if he took me away then Monsieur St. Armand might come.
Perhaps it was all wrong and wicked, but Jeanne was an angel. Ah, if she could hold her in her old arms once more! Father Gilbert went to see M. Loisel. What was it about the money the Indian woman and the child had? Could not the Church take better care of it? And if the girl was dead, what then? M. Loisel explained the wording of the bequest. If both died it went back to the Bellestre estate.
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