Commodore Paul Jones, nervously irritable with the loss of the America, asks leave of Congress to go as a volunteer with the French fleet, which hopes to find and fight the English in the West Indies. Congress consents, and he sails southward with Captain Vaudreuil, to fight yellow fever, not English, and return much shaken in health. As a solace and a recuperative, he sends divers cargoes of oil to Europe on a speculation, and makes forty thousand dollars. All the time he is pining to get back to Paris, his Aimee, the good Marsan, as well as Aimee’s sister’s “sweet little godson,” that must “be covered with kisses.” He is detained by his accounts with the government and his claims for prize money. After heart-breaking delays, his affairs are adjusted; again he finds himself outward bound for France. His Aimee meets him with kisses sweet as heaven. He unlocks her white arms from his neck, and asks in a whisper:

“Where is he?”

“He is dead!” she says, with a rush of tears.

Then she carries him to a quiet cemetery, and, taking his hand, leads him to a little grave, upon which the new grass has not grown two weeks. There is a tiny headstone of pale granite, and on it the one word:

“Paul.”

His gaze is long and steadfast as he holds fast by his Aimee’s hand. Then his tears are united with hers; they stand bowed above the little grave.

Commodore Paul Jones and his Aimee, while ever together, formally conceal the tie that binds them. He has business with the king about prize money; she has petitions before the king about the blood that is common to her veins and his; and both the good Marsan and Doctor Franklin say it is better that the king should not know. And so the king goes feeding his squirrels and forgetting his people, in ignorance of what took place on that midnight before the candle-lighted altar of Our Lady of Loretto. But the wise old world is not so thick, and winks and smiles and wags its wise old head; and whenever it passes a pretty cottage in the Rue Vivienne it points and whispers tolerantly. For the wise old world loves lovers; and because Aimee always officially resides with the good Marsan when her “Paul” is in Paris, and actually resides with that amiable gentlewoman when her “Paul” is in London, or Copenhagen, or elsewhere on the complex business of those prize moneys, no one finds fault. And so four years of love and truth and sweetness, four beautiful years, throughout which the birds sing and the sun shines always, come and go for Commodore Paul Jones and his Aimee; and every noble door in France swings open at their approach.

The prize money gets into a tangle, and Commodore Paul Jones consults his friends, Mirabeau and the venerable Malesherbes. Then he visits America, and is feted and feasted, while his Aimee—each year rounder and plumper and more bewitching—with the red-gold hair growing ever redder and more golden—stays in Paris by the side of the good Marsan, and keeps a loving eye on the vine-clothed cottage in the Rue Vivienne.

Nothing can exceed the honors wherewith Commodore Paul Jones is stormed upon and pelted while in America. He is banqueted by the Morrises, the Livingstons, the Hamiltons, the Jays, while—what is more to his heart’s comfort—he is visited by Dale and Fanning and Mayrant and Lunt and Stack and Potter and scores of his old sea wolves of the Ranger and Richard, who crowd round him to press his hand. In the end he drinks a last cup of wine at the Livingston Manor House, rides down to the foot of C............