"It's French and fanciful," she retorted--"both music and words."
"The child's French--what would you have?" asked Jean Jacques
indignantly.
"The child's father was English, and she's goin' to be English, the
darlin', from now on and on and on. That's settled. There's manny an
English and Irish lullaby that'll be sung to her hence and onward; and
there's manny an English song she'll sing when she's got her voice, and
is big enough. Well, I think she'll sing like a canary."
"Do the birds sing in English?" exclaimed Jean Jacques, with anger in his
face now. Was there ever any vanity like the vanity of these people who
had made the conquest of Quebec, when sixteen Barbilles lost their lives,
one of them being aide-de-camp to M. Vaudreuil, the governor!
"All the canaries I ever heard sung in English," she returned stubbornly.
"How do Frenchmen understand their singing, then?" irritably questioned
Jean Jacques.
"Well, in translation only," she retorted, and with her sharp white teeth
she again bit the black thread of her needle, tied the end into a little
knot, and began to mend the waistcoat which she had laid down in the
first moments of the interview.
"I want the child," Jean Jacques insisted abruptly. "I'll wait till she
wakes, and then I'll wrap her up and take her away."
"Didn't you hear me say she was to be brought up English?" asked Norah,
with a slowness which clothed her fiercest impulses.
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