married some Creole whose ideas about life had dovetailed with those of the Daquin family. Growing poorer and poorer year by year, the sleepy cycle of uneventful days would have continued, as untouched by the outside world as the bayous that bordered the rushing, ever changing Mississippi.
Into these quiet backwaters Mary Robertson had swept. Her coming had been like the digging of a channel that linked the sluggish bayou with the pellmell hurtling stream nearby. Mimi’s mother died when she was nine. His beloved Margot gone, Jean had floundered about, terrified by loneliness, panic-stricken when he found himself the sole keeper and guardian and nurse of a perturbingly active child of nine. He felt as though some malevolent power had inveigled him into a boat, rowed him far from shore and then deftly removed the bottom of the craft. He felt himself splashing, treading water, frantically feeling for solid earth beneath his feet and finding none.
Margot with quiet efficiency had guided him, consoled him, upheld him. With gentle self-effacement she had suggested solutions to the problems which arose in his little sick-and-accident insurance company, woefully lacking as it was in modern business methods, but which furnished sufficient revenue to satisfy their simple needs. So cleverly had she managed these hints, he never knew until after her death how she had planted the seed of these ideas in his head, watched them grow until they met the little crises which arose and then flattered his gentle and simple soul by telling him how cleverly he had solved the perplexities of the moment.
Jean had often told Mimi how Mary Robertson had come to New Orleans on a visit at Mardi Gras time two years after Margot had died and just when he had become most lonely and afraid. His grief had dulled his senses so completely that for more than a year after his wife had died Jean had lived in a state that bordered on coma. When he