CHAPTER XXIX.
THE STORY OF BRAS-COUPE, CONTINUED Bras-Coupe let the autumn pass, and wintered in his den.
Don Jose, in a majestic way, endeavored to be happy.

He took his senora to his hall, and under her rule it took on for a while a look and feeling which turned it from a hunting-lodge into a home.

Wherever the lady's steps turned--or it is as correct to say wherever the proud tread of Palmyre turned--the features of bachelor's-hall disappeared; guns, dogs, oars, saddles, nets, went their way into proper banishment, and the broad halls and lofty chambers--the floors now muffled with mats of palmetto-leaf--no longer re-echoed the tread of a lonely master, but breathed a redolence of flowers and a rippling murmur of well-contented song.
But the song was not from the throat of Bras-Coupe's "_piti zozo_." Silent and severe by day, she moaned away whole nights heaping reproaches upon herself for the impulse--now to her, because it had failed, inexplicable in its folly--which had permitted her hand to lie in Bras-Coupe's and the priest to bind them together.
For in the audacity of her pride, or, as Agricola would have said, in the immensity of her impudence, she had held herself consecrate to a hopeless love.

But now she was a black man's wife! and even he unable to sit at her feet and learn the lesson she had hoped to teach him.

She had heard of San Domingo; for months the fierce heart within her silent bosom had been leaping and shouting and seeing visions of fire and blood, and when she brooded over the nearness of Agricola and the remoteness of Honore these visions got from her a sort of mad consent.
The lesson she would have taught the giant was Insurrection.