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Fifine babbled out an assortment of words with many an ellipsis and many a breathy aspiration which even those accustomed to the infant infirmities of her tongue could with difficulty interpret. Both Odalie and Hamish, bending attentive eyes upon her, discerned at last the words to mean that Mr. Gilfillan had no hair to plait.
That officer had forgotten him utterly, except as a factor in his plan. He sat so jocund and cheerful beside the table in the great hall that Odalie, summoned thither, looked at him in surprise, thinking he must have received some good news, a theory corrected in another moment by the downcast, remonstrant, doubtful expression on Demeré's face.
"Oh, this is home! home!" she often exclaimed, clasping her hands, and looking out in a sort of solemn delight. "Why don't you say that in French, Odalie?" Hamish would mischievously ask.
Odalie had often noted it; dark it was, for the shadows fell on it, and it might be deep; limited it would but hold her piggin, should she thrust it there, or admit a man's head, yet not his shoulders and this was what it had done yesterday, for protruding thence Fifine maintained she had seen Willinawaugh's face with "him top-feathers, him head, an' him ugly mouf!"
Odalie, too, had been carefully prompted, and Stuart's anticipatory answers were very definitely delivered, as of her own volition.
Standing distinctly outlined against the softly tinted mountain landscape, which was opalescent in its illumined hues, faint and fading, and extending his hand with a motion of inquiry toward Odalie, the savage demanded in a lordly tone, "Flinch? Flanzy?"
Fifine became angry at this suggestion, for had not "Dill" built the stockade, and would he build a stockade so Indians might get through and cut off her curls she bounced them about her head that Dill said were "'andsomer than any queen's." But Odalie knew she had seen "Fonny" at the stockade, and Fifine contradicted, and after a spirited passage of "Did!" "Didn't!" "Did!" "Didn't!"
"I accept a new anthropological dogma. Man is only the fort-builder woman is the home-maker!" "Yes," said Odalie in content and pride, surveying her treasures, as she conducted him about the place, for he had not been here since the completion of the improvements; "I often say that this is home!" "But never in French," put in Hamish at her elbow.
He caught upon his white wing and tail-feathers, as he flirted them, the clear radiance of the moon, not a great orb, but sending forth a light fair enough to be felt in all that sidereal glitter of the cloudless sky, to show the faces of Odalie and Belinda and others less comely, as the ladies sat in chairs under the line of trees on one side of the parade with a group of officers near them, and the soldiers and "single men" and children of the settlers filling the benches of the post which were brought out for the occasion.
Odalie herself had that strong nerve of sympathy with the springing growths of the earth that made every turned furrow of the rich mould a delight to her. It was not work it partook of the nature of a pastime, wrought for the love of it, when following her husband's plough she dropped the Indian corn and covered it with her hoe.
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