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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Chance Acquaintance, by W. D. Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Chance Acquaintance
+
+Author: W. D. Howells
+
+Release Date: June 11, 2006 [EBook #18555]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                      _A Chance Acquaintance._
+
+
+                          BY W. D. HOWELLS.
+
+
+                               BOSTON:
+                     JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY
+
+           Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.
+
+                                1873.
+
+         University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge.
+
+
+
+
+A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+UP THE SAGUENAY.
+
+
+On the forward promenade of the Saguenay boat which had been advertised
+to leave Quebec at seven o'clock on Tuesday morning, Miss Kitty Ellison
+sat tranquilly expectant of the joys which its departure should bring,
+and tolerantly patient of its delay; for if all the Saguenay had not
+been in promise, she would have thought it the greatest happiness just
+to have that prospect of the St. Lawrence and Quebec. The sun shone with
+a warm yellow light on the Upper Town, with its girdle of gray wall, and
+on the red flag that drowsed above the citadel, and was a friendly
+lustre on the tinned roofs of the Lower Town; while away off to the
+south and east and west wandered the purple hills and the farmlit plains
+in such dewy shadow and effulgence as would have been enough to make the
+heaviest heart glad. Near at hand the river was busy with every kind of
+craft, and in the distance was mysterious with silvery vapors; little
+breaths of haze, like an ethereal colorless flame, exhaled from its
+surface, and it all glowed with a lovely inner radiance. In the middle
+distance a black ship was heaving anchor and setting sail, and the voice
+of the seamen came soft and sad and yet wildly hopeful to the dreamy ear
+of the young girl, whose soul at once went round the world before the
+ship, and then made haste back again to the promenade of the Saguenay
+boat. She sat leaning forward a little with her hands fallen into her
+lap, letting her unmastered thoughts play as they would in memories and
+hopes around the consciousness that she was the happiest girl in the
+world, and blest beyond desire or desert. To have left home as she had
+done, equipped for a single day at Niagara, and then to have come
+adventurously on, by grace of her cousin's wardrobe, as it were, to
+Montreal and Quebec; to be now going up the Saguenay, and finally to be
+destined to return home by way of Boston and New York;--this was more
+than any one human being had a right to; and, as she had written home to
+the girls, she felt that her privileges ought to be divided up among all
+the people of Eriecreek. She was very grateful to Colonel Ellison and
+Fanny for affording her these advantages; but they being now out of
+sight in pursuit of state-rooms, she was not thinking of them in
+relation to her pleasure in the morning scene, but was rather regretting
+the absence of a lady with whom they had travelled from Niagara, and to
+whom she imagined she would that moment like to say something in praise
+of the prospect. This lady was a Mrs. Basil March of Boston; and though
+it was her wedding journey and her husband's presence ought to have
+absorbed her, she and Miss Kitty had sworn a sisterhood, and were
+pledged to see each other before long at Mrs. March's home in Boston. In
+her absence, now, Kitty thought what a very charming person she was, and
+wondered if all Boston people were really like her, so easy and friendly
+and hearty. In her letter she had told the girls to tell her Uncle Jack
+that he had not rated Boston people a bit too high, if she were to judge
+from Mr. and Mrs. March, and that she was sure they would help her as
+far as they could to carry out his instructions when she got to Boston.
+
+These instructions were such as might seem preposterous if no more
+particular statement in regard to her Uncle Jack were made, but will be
+imaginable enough, I hope, when he is a little described. The Ellisons
+were a West Virginia family who had wandered up into a corner of
+Northwestern New York, because Dr. Ellison (unceremoniously known to
+Kitty as Uncle Jack) was too much an abolitionist to live in a
+slaveholding State with safety to himself or comfort to his neighbors.
+Here his family of three boys and two girls had grown up, and hither in
+time had come Kitty, the only child of his youngest brother, who had
+gone first to Illinois and thence, from the pretty constant adversity of
+a country editor, to Kansas, where he joined the Free State party and
+fell in one of the border feuds. Her mother had died soon after, find
+Dr. Ellison's heart bowed itself tenderly over the orphan. She was
+something not only dear, but sacred to him as the child of a martyr to
+the highest cause on earth; and the love of the whole family encompassed
+her. One of the boys had brought her from Kansas when she was yet very
+little, and she had grown up among them as their youngest sister; but
+the doctor, from a tender scruple against seeming to usurp the place of
+his brother in her childish thought, would not let her call him father,
+and in obedience to the rule which she soon began to give their love,
+they all turned and called him Uncle Jack with her. Yet the Ellisons,
+though they loved their little cousin, did not spoil her,--neither the
+doctor, nor his great grown-up sons whom she knew as the boys, nor his
+daughters whom she called the girls, though they were wellnigh women
+when she came to them. She was her uncle's pet and most intimate friend,
+riding with him on his professional visits till she became as familiar a
+feature of his equipage as the doctor's horse itself; and he educated
+her in those extreme ideas, tempered by humor, which formed the
+character of himself and his family. They loved Kitty, and played with
+her, and laughed at her when she needed ridiculing; they made a jest of
+their father on the one subject on which he never jested, and even the
+antislavery cause had its droll points turned to the light. They had
+seen danger and trouble enough at different times in its service, but no
+enemy ever got more amusement out of it. Their house was a principal
+_entrepot_ of the underground railroad, and they were always helping
+anxious travellers over the line; but the boys seldom came back from an
+excursion to Canada without adventures to keep the family laughing for a
+week; and they made it a serious business to study the comic points of
+their beneficiaries, who severally lived in the family records by some
+grotesque mental or physical trait. They had an irreverent name among
+themselves for each of the humorless abolition lecturers who unfailingly
+abode with them on their rounds; and these brethren and sisters, as they
+called them, paid with whatever was laughable in them for the
+substantial favors they received.
+
+Miss Kitty, having the same natural bent, began even as a child to share
+in these harmless reprisals, and to look at life with the same
+wholesomely fantastic vision. But she remembered one abolition visitor
+of whom none of them made fun, but treated with a serious distinction
+and regard,--an old man with a high, narrow forehead, and thereon a
+thick upright growth of gray hair; who looked at her from under bushy
+brows with eyes as of blue flame, and took her on his knee one night and
+sang to her "Blow ye the trumpet, blow!" He and her uncle had been
+talking of some indefinite, far-off place that they called Boston, in
+terms that commended it to her childish apprehension as very little less
+holy than Jerusalem, and as the home of all the good and great people
+outside of Palestine.
+
+In fact, Boston had always been Dr. Ellison's foible. In the beginning
+of the great antislavery agitation, he had exchanged letters
+(corresponded, he used to say) with John Quincy Adams on the subject of
+Lovejoy's murder; and he had met several Boston men at the Free Soil
+Convention in Buffalo in 1848. "A little formal perhaps, a little
+reserved," he would say, "but excellent men; polished, and certainly of
+sterling principle": which would make his boys and girls laugh, as they
+grew older, and sometimes provoke them to highly colored dramatizations
+of the formality of these Bostonians in meeting their father. The years
+passed and the boys went West, and when the war came, they took service
+in Iowa and Wisconsin regiments. By and by the President's Proclamation
+of freedom to the slaves reached Eriecreek while Dick and Bob happened
+both to be home on leave. After they had allowed their sire his rapture,
+"Well, this is a great blow for father," said Bob; "what are you going
+to do now, father? Fugitive slavery and all its charms blotted out
+forever, at one fell swoop. Pretty rough on you, isn't it? No more men
+and brothers, no more soulless oligarchy. Dull lookout, father."
+
+"O no," insinuated one of the girls, "there's Boston."
+
+"Why, yes," cried Dick, "to be sure there is. The President hasn't
+abolished Boston. Live for Boston."
+
+And the doctor did live for an ideal Boston, thereafter, so far at least
+as concerned a never-relinquished, never-fulfilled purpose of some day
+making a journey to Boston. But in the mean time there were other
+things; and at present, since the Proclamation had given him a country
+worth living in, he was ready to honor her by studying her antiquities.
+In his youth, before his mind had been turned so strenuously to the
+consideration of slavery, he had a pretty taste for the mystery of the
+Mound Builders, and each of his boys now returned to camp with
+instructions to note any phenomena that would throw light upon this
+interesting subject. They would have abundant leisure for research,
+since the Proclamation, Dr. Ellison insisted, practically ended the war.
+
+The Mound Builders were only a starting-point for the doctor. He
+advanced from them to historical times in due course, and it happened
+that when Colonel Ellison and his wife stopped off at Eriecreek on their
+way East, in 1870, they found him deep in the history of the Old French
+War. As yet the colonel had not intended to take the Canadian route
+eastward, and he escaped without the charges which he must otherwise
+have received to look up the points of interest at Montreal and Quebec
+connected with that ancient struggle. He and his wife carried Kitty with
+them to see Niagara (which she had never seen because it was so near);
+but no sooner had Dr. Ellison got the despatch announcing that they
+would take Kitty on with them down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and bring
+her home by way of Boston, than he sat down and wrote her a letter of
+the most comprehensive character. As far as concerned Canada his mind
+was purely historical; but when it came to Boston it was strangely
+re-abolitionized, and amidst an ardor for the antiquities of the place,
+his old love for its humanitarian pre-eminence blazed up. He would have
+her visit Faneuil Hall because of its Revolutionary memories, but not
+less because Wendell Phillips had there made his first antislavery
+speech. She was to see the collections of the Massachusetts Historical
+Society, and if possible certain points of ancient colonial interest
+which he named; but at any rate she was somehow to catch sight of the
+author of the "Biglow Papers," of Senator Sumner, of Mr. Whittier, of
+Dr. Howe, of Colonel Higginson, and of Mr. Garrison. These people were
+all Bostonians to the idealizing remoteness of Dr. Ellison, and he could
+not well conceive of them asunder. He perhaps imagined that Kitty was
+more likely to see them together than separately; and perhaps indeed
+they were less actual persons, to his admiration, than so many figures
+of a grand historical composition. Finally, "I want you to remember, my
+dear child," he wrote, "that in Boston you are not only in the
+birthplace of American liberty, but the yet holier scene of its
+resurrection. There everything that is noble and grand and liberal and
+enlightened in the national life has originated, and I cannot doubt that
+you will find the character of its people marked by every attribute of a
+magnanimous democracy. If I could envy you anything, my dear girl, I
+should envy you this privilege of seeing a city where man is valued
+simply and solely for what he is in himself, and where color, wealth,
+family, occupation, and other vulgar and meretricious distinctions are
+wholly lost sight of in the consideration of individual excellence."
+
+Kitty got her uncle's letter the night before starting up the Saguenay,
+and quite too late for compliance with his directions concerning Quebec;
+but she resolved that as to Boston his wishes should be fulfilled to the
+utmost limit of possibility. She knew that nice Mr. March must be
+acquainted with some of those very people. Kitty had her uncle's letter
+in her pocket, and she was just going to take it out and read it again,
+when something else attracted her notice.
+
+The boat had been advertised to leave at seven o'clock, and it was now
+half past. A party of English people were pacing somewhat impatiently up
+and down before Kitty, for it had been made known among the passengers
+(by that subtle process through which matters of public interest
+transpire in such places) that breakfast would not be served till the
+boat started, and these English people had the appetites which go before
+the admirable digestions of their nation. But they had also the good
+temper which does not so certainly accompany the insular good appetite.
+The man in his dashing Glengarry cap and his somewhat shabby gray suit
+took on one arm the plain, jolly woman who seemed to be his wife, and on
+the other, the amiable, handsome young girl who looked enough like him
+to be his sister, and strode rapidly back and forth, saying that they
+must get up an appetite for breakfast. This made the women laugh, and so
+he said it again, which made them laugh so much that the elder lost her
+balance, and in regaining it twisted off her high shoe-heel, which she
+briskly tossed into the river. But she sat down after that, and the
+three were presently intent upon the Liverpool steamer which was just
+arrived and was now gliding up to her dock, with her population of
+passengers thronging her quarter-deck.
+
+"She's from England!" said the husband, expressively.
+
+"Only fancy!" answered the wife. "Give me the glass, Jenny." Then, after
+a long survey of the steamer, she added, "Fancy her being from England!"
+They all looked and said nothing for two or three minutes, when the
+wife's mind turned to the delay of their own boat and of breakfast.
+"This thing," she said, with that air of uttering a novelty which the
+English cast about their commonplaces,--"this this thing doesn't start
+at seven, you know."
+
+"No," replied the younger woman, "she waits for the Montreal boat."
+
+"Fancy her being from England!" said the other, whose eyes and thoughts
+had both wandered back to the Liverpool steamer.
+
+"There's the Montreal boat now, comin' round the point," cried the
+husband. "Don't you see the steam?" He pointed with his glass, and then
+studied the white cloud in the distance. "No, by Jove! it's a saw-mill
+on the shore."
+
+"O Harry!" sighed both the women, reproachfully.
+
+"Why, deuce take it, you know," he retorted, "I didn't turn it into a
+saw-mill. It's been a saw-mill all along, I fancy."
+
+Half an hour later, when the Montreal boat came in sight, the women
+would have her a saw-mill till she stood in full view in mid-channel.
+Their own vessel paddled out into the stream as she drew near, and the
+two bumped and rubbed together till a gangway plank could he passed from
+one to the other. A very well dressed young man stood ready to get upon
+the Saguenay boat, with a porter beside him bearing his substantial
+valise. No one else apparently was coming aboard.
+
+The English people looked upon him for an instant with wrathful eyes, as
+they hung over the rail of the promenade. "Upon my word," said the elder
+of the women, "have we been waitin' all this time for one man?"
+
+"Hush, Edith," answered the younger, "it's an Englishman." And they all
+three mutely recognized the right of the Englishman to stop, not only
+the boat, but the whole solar system, if his ticket entitled him to a
+passage on any particular planet, while Mr. Miles Arbuton of Boston,
+Massachusetts, passed at his ease from one vessel to the other. He had
+often been mistaken for an Englishman, and the error of those
+spectators, if he had known it, would not have surprised him. Perhaps it
+might have softened his judgment of them as he sat facing them at
+breakfast; but he did not know it, and he thought them three very common
+English people with something professional, as of public singing or
+acting, about them. The young girl wore, instead of a travelling-suit, a
+vivid light blue dress; and over her sky-blue eyes and fresh cheeks a
+glory of corn-colored hair lay in great braids and masses. It was
+magnificent, but it wanted distance; so near, it was almost harsh. Mr.
+Arbuton's eyes fell from the face to the vivid blue dress, which was not
+quite fresh and not quite new, and a glimmer of cold dismissal came into
+them, as he gave himself entirely to the slender merits of the steamboat
+breakfast.
+
+He was himself, meantime, an object of interest to a young lady who sat
+next to the English party, and who glanced at him from time to time, out
+of tender gray eyes, with a furtive play of feeling upon a sensitive
+face. To her he was that divine possibility which every young man is to
+every young maiden; and, besides, he was invested with a halo of romance
+as the gentleman with the blond mustache, whom she had seen at Niagara
+the week before, on the Goat Island Bridge. To the pretty matron at her
+side, he was exceedingly handsome, as a young man may frankly be to a
+young matron, but not otherwise comparable to her husband, the
+full-personed good-humored looking gentleman who had just added sausage
+to the ham and eggs on his plate. He was handsome, too, but his full
+beard was reddish, whereas Mr. Arbuton's mustache was flaxen; and his
+dress was not worn with that scrupulosity with which the Bostonian bore
+his clothes; there was a touch of slovenliness in him that scarcely
+consorted with the alert, ex-military air of some of his movements.
+"Good-looking young John Bull," he thought concerning Mr. Arbuton, and
+then thought no more about him, being no more self-judged before the
+supposed Englishman than he would have been before so much Frenchman or
+Spaniard. Mr. Arbuton, on the other hand, if he had met an Englishman so
+well dressed as himself, must at once have arraigned himself, and had
+himself tacitly tried for his personal and national difference. He
+looked in his turn at these people, and thought he should have nothing
+to do with them, in spite of the long-lashed gray eyes.
+
+It was not that they had made the faintest advance towards acquaintance,
+or that the choice of knowing them or not was with Mr. Arbuton; but he
+had the habit of thus protecting himself from the chances of life, and a
+conscience against encouraging people whom he might have to drop for
+reasons of society. This was sometimes a sacrifice, for he was not past
+the age when people take a lively interest in most other human beings.
+When breakfast was over, and he had made the tour of the boat, and seen
+all his fellow-passengers, he perceived that he could have little in
+common with any of them, and that probably the journey would require the
+full exercise of that tolerant spirit in which he had undertaken a
+branch of summer travel in his native land.
+
+The rush of air against the steamer was very raw and chill, and the
+forward promenade was left almost entirely to the English professional
+people, who walked rapidly up and down, with jokes and laughter of their
+kind, while the wind blew the girl's hair in loose gold about her fresh
+face, and twisted her blue drapery tight about her comely shape. When
+they got out of breath they sat down beside a large American lady, with
+a great deal of gold filling in her front teeth, and presently rose
+again and ran races to and from the bow. Mr. Arbuton turned away in
+displeasure. At the stern he found a much larger company, most of whom
+had furnished themselves with novels and magazines from the stock on
+board and were drowsing over them. One gentleman was reading aloud to
+three ladies the newspaper account of a dreadful shipwreck; other ladies
+and gentlemen were coming and going forever from their state-rooms, as
+the wont of some is; others yet sat with closed eyes, as if having come
+to see the Saguenay they were resolved to see nothing of the St.
+Lawrence on the way thither, but would keep their vision sacred to the
+wonders of the former river.
+
+Yet the St. Lawrence was worthy to be seen, as even Mr. Arbuton owned,
+whose way was to slight American scenery, in distinction from his
+countrymen who boast it the finest in the world. As you leave Quebec,
+with its mural-crowned and castled rock, and drop down the stately
+river, presently the snowy fall of Montmorenci, far back in its purple
+hollow, leaps perpetual avalanche into the abyss, and then you are
+abreast of the beautiful Isle of Orleans, whose low shores, with their
+expanses of farmland, and their groves of pine and oak, are still as
+lovely as when the wild grape festooned the primitive forests and won
+from the easy rapture of old Cartier the name of Isle of Bacchus. For
+two hours farther down the river either shore is bright and populous
+with the continuous villages of the _habitans_, each clustering about
+its slim-spired church, in its shallow vale by the water's edge, or
+lifted in more eminent picturesqueness upon some gentle height. The
+banks, nowhere lofty or abrupt, are such as in a southern land some
+majestic river might flow between, wide, slumbrous, open to all the
+heaven and the long day till the very set of sun. But no starry palm
+glasses its crest in the clear cold green from these low brinks; the
+pale birch, slender and delicately fair, mirrors here the wintry
+whiteness of its boughs; and this is the sad great river of the awful
+North.
+
+Gradually, as the day wore on, the hills which had shrunk almost out of
+sight on one hand, and on the other were dark purple in the distance,
+drew near the shore, and at one point on the northern side rose almost
+from the water's edge. The river expanded into a lake before them, and
+in their lap some cottages, and half-way up the hillside, among the
+stunted pines, a much-galleried hotel, proclaimed a resort of fashion in
+the heart of what seemed otherwise a wilderness. Indian huts sheathed in
+birch-bark nestled at the foot of the rocks, which were rich in orange
+and scarlet stains; out of the tops of the huts curled the blue smoke,
+and at the door of one stood a squaw in a flame-red petticoat; others in
+bright shawls squatted about on the rocks, each with a circle of dogs
+and papooses. But all this warmth of color only served, like a winter
+sunset, to heighten the chilly and desolate sentiment of the scene. The
+light dresses of the ladies on the veranda struck cold upon the eye; in
+the faces of the sojourners who lounged idly to the steamer's
+landing-place, the passenger could fancy a sad resolution to repress
+their tears when the boat should go away and leave them. She put off two
+or three old peasant-women who were greeted by other such on the pier,
+as if returned from a long journey; and then the crew discharged the
+vessel of a prodigious freight of onions which formed the sole luggage
+these old women had brought from Quebec. Bale after bale of the pungent
+bulbs were borne ashore in the careful arms of the deck-hands, and
+counted by the owners; at last order was given to draw in the plank,
+when a passionate cry burst from one of the old women, who extended both
+hands with an imploring gesture towards the boat. A bale of onions had
+been left aboard; a deck-hand seized it and ran quickly ashore with it,
+and then back again, followed by the benedictions of the tranquillized
+and comforted beldam. The gay sojourners at Murray Bay controlled their
+grief, and as Mr. Arbuton turned from them, the boat, pushing out, left
+them to their fashionable desolation. She struck across to the southern
+shore, to land passengers for Cacouna, a watering-place greater than
+Murray Bay. The tide, which rises fifteen feet at Quebec, is the
+impulse, not the savor of the sea; but at Cacouna the water is salt, and
+the sea-bathing lacks nothing but the surf; and hither resort in great
+numbers the Canadians who fly their cities during the fierce, brief
+fever of the northern summer. The watering-place village and hotel is
+not in sight from the landing, but, as at Murray Bay, the sojourners
+thronged the pier, as if the arrival of the steamboat were the great
+event of their day. That afternoon they were in unusual force, having
+come on foot and by omnibus and calash; and presently there passed down
+through their ranks a strange procession with a band of music leading
+the way to the steamer.
+
+"It's an Indian wedding," Mr. Arbuton heard one of the boat's officers
+saying to the gentleman with the ex-military air, who stood next him
+beside the rail; and now, the band having drawn aside, he saw the bride
+and groom,--the latter a common, stolid-faced savage, and the former
+pretty and almost white, with a certain modesty and sweetness of mien.
+Before them went a young American, with a jaunty Scotch cap and a visage
+of supernatural gravity, as the master of ceremonies which he had
+probably planned; arm in arm with him walked a portly chieftain in black
+broadcloth, preposterously adorned on the breast with broad flat disks
+of silver in two rows. Behind the bridal couple came the whole village
+in pairs, men and women, and children of all ages, even to brown babies
+in arms, gay in dress and indescribably serious in demeanor. They were
+mated in some sort according to years and size; and the last couple were
+young fellows paired in an equal tipsiness. These reeled and wavered
+along the pier; and when the other wedding guests crowned the day's
+festivity by going aboard the steamer, they followed dizzily down the
+gangway. Midway they lurched heavily; the spectators gave a cry; but
+they had happily lurched in opposite directions; their grip upon each
+other's arms held, and a forward stagger launched them victoriously
+aboard in a heap. They had scarcely disappeared from sight, when, having
+as it were instantly satisfied their curiosity concerning the boat, the
+other guests began to go ashore in due order. Mr. Arbuton waited in a
+slight anxiety to see whether the tipsy couple could repeat their
+maneuver successfully on an upward incline; and they had just appeared
+on the gangway, when he felt a hand passed carelessly and as if
+unconsciously through his arm, and at the same moment a voice said,
+"Those are a pair of disappointed lovers, I suppose."
+
+He looked round and perceived the young lady of the party he had made up
+his mind to have nothing to do with resting one hand on the rail, and
+sustaining herself with the other passed through his arm, while she was
+altogether intent upon the scene below. The ex-military gentleman, the
+head of the party, and apparently her kinsman, had stepped aside without
+her knowing, and she had unwittingly taken Mr. Arbuton's arm. So much
+was clear to him, but what he was to do was not so plain. It did not
+seem quite his place to tell her of her mistake, and yet it seemed a
+piece of unfairness not to do so. To leave the matter alone, however,
+was the simplest, safest, and pleasantest; for the pressure of the
+pretty figure lightly thrown upon his arm had something agreeably
+confiding and appealing in it. So he waited till the young lady, turning
+to him for some response, discovered her error, and disengaged herself
+with a face of mingled horror and amusement. Even then he had no
+inspiration. To speak of the mistake in tones of compliment would have
+been grossly out of place; an explanation was needless; and to her
+murmured excuses, he could only bow silently. She flitted into the
+cabin, and he walked away, leaving the Indians to stagger ashore as they
+might. His arm seemed still to sustain that elastic weight, and a voice
+haunted his ear with the words, "A pair of disappointed lovers, I
+suppose"; and still more awkward and stupid he felt his own part in the
+affair to be; though at the same time he was not without some obscure
+resentment of the young girl's mistake as an intrusion upon him.
+
+It was late twilight when the boat reached Tadoussac, and ran into a
+sheltered cove under the shadow of uplands on which a quaint village
+perched and dispersed itself on a country road in summer cottages; above
+these in turn rose loftier heights of barren sand or rock, with here and
+there a rank of sickly pines dying along their sterility. It had been
+harsh and cold all day when the boat moved, for it was running full in
+the face of the northeast; the river had widened almost to a sea,
+growing more and more desolate, with a few lonely islands breaking its
+expanse, and the shores sinking lower and lower till, near Tadoussac,
+they rose a little in flat-topped bluffs thickly overgrown with stunted
+evergreens. Here, into the vast low-walled breadth of the St. Lawrence,
+a dark stream, narrowly bordered by rounded heights of rock, steals down
+from the north out of regions of gloomy and ever-during solitude. This
+is the Saguenay; and in the cold evening light under which the traveller
+approaches its mouth, no landscape could look more forlorn than that of
+Tadoussac, where early in the sixteenth century the French traders fixed
+their first post, and where still the oldest church north of Florida is
+standing.
+
+The steamer lies here five hours, and supper was no sooner over than the
+passengers went ashore in the gathering dusk. Mr. Arbuton, guarding his
+distance as usual, went too, with a feeling of surprise at his own
+concession to the popular impulse. He was not without a desire to see
+the old church, wondering in a half-compassionate way what such a bit of
+American antiquity would look like; and he had perceived since the
+little embarrassment at Cacouna that he was a discomfort to the young
+lady involved by it. He had caught no glimpse of her till supper, and
+then she had briefly supped with an air of such studied unconsciousness
+of his presence that it was plain she was thinking of her mistake every
+moment. "Well, I'll leave her the freedom of the boat while we stay,"
+thought Mr. Arbuton as he went ashore. He had not the least notion
+whither the road led, but like the rest he followed it up through the
+village, and on among the cottages which seemed for the most part empty,
+and so down a gloomy ravine, in the bottom of which, far beneath the
+tremulous rustic bridge, he heard the mysterious crash and fall of an
+unseen torrent. Before him towered the shadowy hills up into the
+starless night; he thrilled with a sense of the loneliness and
+remoteness, and he had a formless wish that some one qualified by the
+proper associations and traditions were there to share the satisfaction
+he felt in the whole effect. At the same instant he was once more aware
+of that delicate pressure, that weight so lightly, sweetly borne upon
+his arm. It startled him, and again he followed the road, which with a
+sudden turn brought him in sight of a hotel and in sound of a
+bowling-alley, and therein young ladies' cackle and laughter, and he
+wondered a little scornfully who could be spending the summer there. A
+bay of the river loftily shut in by rugged hills lay before him, and on
+the shore, just above high-tide, stood what a wandering shadow told him
+was the ancient church of Tadoussac. The windows were faintly tinged
+with red as from a single taper burning within, and but that the
+elements were a little too bare and simple for one so used to the rich
+effects of the Old World, Mr. Arbuton might have been touched by the
+vigil which this poor chapel was still keeping after three hundred years
+in the heart of that gloomy place. While he stood at least tolerating
+its appeal, he heard voices of people talking in the obscurity near the
+church door, which they seemed to have been vainly trying for entrance.
+
+"Pity we can't see the inside, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes; but I am so glad to see any of it. Just think of its having been
+built in the seventeenth century!"
+
+"Uncle Jack would enjoy it, wouldn't he?"
+
+"O yes, poor Uncle Jack! I feel somehow as if I were cheating him out of
+it. He ought to be here in my place. But I _do_ like it; and, Dick, I
+don't know what I can ever say or do to you and Fanny for bringing me."
+
+"Well, Kitty, postpone the subject till you can think of the right
+thing. We're in no hurry."
+
+Mr. Arbuton heard a shaking of the door, as of a final attempt upon it,
+before retreat, and then the voices faded into inarticulate sounds in
+the darkness. They were the voices, he easily recognized, of the young
+lady who had taken his arm, and of that kinsman of hers, as she seemed
+to be. He blamed himself for having not only overheard them, but for
+desiring to hear more of their talk, and he resolved to follow them back
+to the boat at a discreet distance. But they loitered so at every point,
+or he unwittingly made such haste, that he had overtaken them as they
+entered the lane between the outlying cottages, and he could not help
+being privy to their talk again.
+
+"Well, it may be old, Kitty, but I don't think it's lively."
+
+"It _is_n't exactly a whirl of excitement, I must confess."
+
+"It's the deadliest place I ever saw. Is that a swing in front of that
+cottage? No, it's a gibbet. Why, they've all got 'em! I suppose they're
+for the summer tenants at the close of the season. What a rush there
+would be for them if the boat should happen to go off and leave her
+passengers!"
+
+Mr. Arbuton thought this rather a coarse kind of drolling, and
+strengthened himself anew in his resolution to avoid those people.
+
+They now came in sight of the steamer, where in the cove she lay
+illumined with all her lamps, and through every window and door and
+crevice was bursting with the ruddy light. Her brilliancy contrasted
+vividly with the obscurity and loneliness of the shore where a few
+lights glimmered in the village houses, and under the porch of the
+village store some desolate idlers--_habitans_ and half-breeds--had
+clubbed their miserable leisure. Beyond the steamer yawned the wide
+vacancy of the greater river, and out of this gloomed the course of the
+Saguenay.
+
+"O, I hate to go on board!" said the young lady. "Do you think he's got
+back yet? It's perfect misery to meet him."
+
+"Never mind, Kitty. He probably thinks you didn't mean anything by it.
+_I_ don't believe you would have taken his arm if you hadn't supposed it
+was mine, _any_ way."
+
+She made no answer to this, as if too much overcome by the true state of
+the case to be troubled by its perversion. Mr. Arbuton, following them
+on board, felt himself in the unpleasant character of persecutor, some
+one to be shunned and escaped by every maneuver possible to
+self-respect. He was to be the means, it appeared, of spoiling the
+enjoyment of the voyage for one who, he inferred, had not often the
+opportunity of such enjoyment. He had a willingness that she should
+think well and not ill of him; and then at the bottom of all was a
+sentiment of superiority, which, if he had given it shape, would have
+been _noblesse oblige_. Some action was due to himself as a gentleman.
+
+The young lady went to seek the matron of the party, and left her
+companion at the door of the saloon, wistfully fingering a cigar in one
+hand, and feeling for a match with the other. Presently he gave himself
+a clap on the waistcoat which he had found empty, and was turning away,
+when Mr. Arbuton said, offering his own lighted cigar, "May I be of use
+to you?"
+
+The other took it with a hearty, "O yes, thank you!" and, with many
+inarticulate murmurs of satisfaction, lighted his cigar, and returned
+Mr. Arbuton's with a brisk, half-military bow.
+
+Mr. Arbuton looked at him narrowly a moment. "I'm afraid," he said
+abruptly, "that I've most unluckily been the cause of annoyance to one
+of the ladies of your party. It isn't a thing to apologize for, and I
+hardly know how to say that I hope, if she's not already forgotten the
+matter, she'll do so." Saying this, Mr. Arbuton, by an impulse which he
+would have been at a loss to explain, offered his card.
+
+His action had the effect of frankness, and the other took it for
+cordiality. He drew near a lamp, and looked at the name and street
+address on the card, and then said, "Ah, of Boston! _My_ name is
+Ellison; I'm of Milwaukee, Wisconsin." And he laughed a free, trustful
+laugh of good companionship. "Why yes, my cousin's been tormenting
+herself about her mistake the whole afternoon; but of course it's all
+right, you know. Bless my heart! it was the most natural thing in the
+world. Have you been ashore? There's a good deal of repose about
+Tadoussac, now; but it must be a lively place in winter! Such a cheerful
+lookout from these cottages, or that hotel over yonder! We went over to
+see if we could get into the little old church; the purser told me there
+are some lead tablets there, left by Jacques Cartier's men, you know,
+and dug up in the neighborhood. I don't think it's likely, and I'm
+bearing up very well under the disappointment of not getting in. I've
+done my duty by the antiquities of the place; and now I don't care how
+soon we are off."
+
+Colonel Ellison was talking in the kindness of his heart to change the
+subject which the younger gentleman had introduced, in the belief, which
+would scarcely have pleased the other, that he was much embarrassed. His
+good-nature went still further; and when his cousin returned presently,
+with Mrs. Ellison, he presented Mr. Arbuton to the ladies, and then
+thoughtfully made Mrs. Ellison walk up and down the deck with him for
+the exercise she would not take ashore, that the others might be left to
+deal with their vexation alone.
+
+"I am very sorry, Miss Ellison," said Mr. Arbuton, "to have been the
+means of a mistake to you to-day."
+
+"And I was dreadfully ashamed to make you the victim of my blunder,"
+answered Miss Ellison penitently; and a little silence ensued. Then as
+if she had suddenly been able to alienate the case, and see it apart
+from herself in its unmanageable absurdity, she broke into a confiding
+laugh, very like her cousin's, and said, "Why, it's one of the most
+hopeless things I ever heard of. I don't see what in the world can be
+done about it."
+
+"It _is_ rather a difficult matter, and I'm not prepared to say myself.
+Before I make up my mind I should like it to happen again."
+
+Mr. Arbuton had no sooner made this speech, which he thought neat, than
+he was vexed with himself for having made it, since nothing was further
+from his purpose than a flirtation. But the dark, vicinity, the young
+girl's prettiness, the apparent freshness and reliance on his sympathy
+from which her frankness came, were too much: he tried to congeal again,
+and ended in some feebleness about the scenery, which was indeed very
+lonely and wild, after the boat started up the Saguenay, leaving the few
+lights of Tadoussac to blink and fail behind her. He had an absurd sense
+of being alone in the world there with the young lady; and he suffered
+himself to enjoy the situation, which was as perfectly safe as anything
+could be. He and Miss Ellison had both come on from Niagara, it seemed,
+and they talked of that place, she consciously withholding the fact that
+she had noticed Mr. Arbuton there; they had both come down the Rapids of
+the St. Lawrence, and they had both stopped a day in Montreal. These
+common experiences gave them a surprising interest for each other, which
+was enhanced by the discovery that their experiences differed
+thereafter, and that whereas she had passed three days at Quebec, he, as
+we know, had come on directly from Montreal.
+
+"Did you enjoy Quebec very much, Miss Ellison?"
+
+"O yes, indeed! It's a beautiful old town, with everything in it that I
+had always read about and never expected to see. You know it's a walled
+city."
+
+"Yes. But I confess I had forgotten it till this morning. Did you find
+it all that you expected a walled city to be?"
+
+"More, if possible. There were some Boston people with us there, and
+they said it was exactly like Europe. They fairly sighed over it, and it
+seemed to remind them of pretty nearly everything they had seen abroad.
+They were just married."
+
+"Did that make Quebec look like Europe?"
+
+"No, but I suppose it made them willing to see it in the pleasantest
+light. Mrs. March--that was their name--wouldn't allow me to say that
+_I_ enjoyed Quebec, because if I hadn't seen Europe, I _could_n't
+properly enjoy it. 'You may _think_ you enjoy it,' she was always
+saying, 'but that's merely fancy.' Still I cling to my delusion. But I
+don't know whether I cared more for Quebec, or the beautiful little
+villages in the country all about it. The whole landscape looks just
+like a dream of 'Evangeline.'"
+
+"Indeed! I must certainly stop at Quebec. I should like to see an
+American landscape that put one in mind of anything. What can your
+imagination do for the present scenery?"
+
+"I don't think it needs any help from me," replied the young girl, as if
+the tone of her companion had patronized and piqued her. She turned as
+she spoke and looked up the sad, lonely river. The moon was making its
+veiled face seen through the gray heaven, and touching the black stream
+with hints of melancholy light. On either hand the uninhabitable shore
+rose in desolate grandeur, friendless heights of rock with a thin
+covering of pines seen in dim outline along their tops and deepening
+into the solid dark of hollows and ravines upon their sides. The cry of
+some wild bird struck through the silence of which the noise of the
+steamer had grown to be a part, and echoed away to nothing. Then from
+the saloon there came on a sudden the notes of a song; and Miss Ellison
+led the way within, where most of the other passengers were grouped
+about the piano. The English girl with the corn-colored hair sat, in
+ravishing picture, at the instrument, and the commonish man and his very
+plain wife were singing with heavenly sweetness together.
+
+"Isn't it beautiful!" said Miss Ellison. "How nice it must be to be able
+to do such things!"
+
+"Yes? do you think so? It's rather public," answered her companion.
+
+When the English people had ended, a grave, elderly Canadian gentleman
+sat down to give what he believed a comic song, and sent everybody
+disconsolate to bed.
+
+"Well, Kitty?" cried Mrs. Ellison, shutting herself inside the young
+lady's state-room a moment.
+
+"Well, Fanny?"
+
+"Isn't he handsome?"
+
+"He is, indeed."
+
+"Is he nice?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Sweet?"
+
+"_Ice_-cream," said Kitty, and placidly let herself be kissed an
+enthusiastic good-night. Before Mrs. Ellison slept she wished to ask her
+husband one question.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Should you want Kitty to marry a Bostonian? They say Bostonians are so
+cold."
+
+"What Bostonian has been asking Kitty to marry him?"
+
+"O, how spiteful you are! I didn't say any had. But if there should?"
+
+"Then it'll be time to think about it. You've married Kitty right and
+left to everybody who's looked at her since we left Niagara, and I've
+worried myself to death investigating the character of her husbands. Now
+I'm not going to do it any longer,--till she has an offer."
+
+"Very well. _You_ can depreciate your own cousin, if you like. But I
+know what _I_ shall do. I shall let her wear all my best things. How
+fortunate it is, Richard, that we're exactly of a size! O, I am so glad
+we brought Kitty along! If she should marry and settle down in
+Boston--no, I hope she could get her husband to live in New York--"
+
+"Go on, go on, my dear!" cried Colonel Ellison, with a groan of despair.
+"Kitty has talked twenty-five minutes with this young man about the
+hotels and steamboats, and of course he'll be round to-morrow morning
+asking my consent to marry her as soon as we can get to a justice of the
+peace. My hair is gradually turning gray, and I shall be bald before my
+time; but I don't mind that if you find any pleasure in these little
+hallucinations of yours. _Go_ on!"
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+MRS. ELLISON'S LITTLE MANEUVRE.
+
+
+The next morning our tourists found themselves at rest in Ha-Ha Bay, at
+the head of navigation for the larger steamers. The long line of sullen
+hills had fallen away, and the morning sun shone warm on what in a
+friendlier climate would have been a very lovely landscape. The bay was
+an irregular oval, with shores that rose in bold but not lofty heights
+on one side, while on the other lay a narrow plain with two villages
+clinging about the road that followed the crescent beach, and lifting
+each the slender tin-clad spire of its church to sparkle in the sun.
+
+At the head of the bay was a mountainous top, and along its waters were
+masses of rocks, gayly painted with lichens and stained with metallic
+tints of orange and scarlet. The unchanging growth of stunted pines was
+the only forest in sight, though Ha-Ha Bay is a famous lumbering port,
+and some schooners now lay there receiving cargoes of odorous pine
+plank. The steamboat-wharf was all astir with the liveliest toil and
+leisure. The boat was taking on wood, which was brought in wheelbarrows
+to the top of the steep, smooth gangway-planking, where the _habitant_
+in charge planted his broad feet for the downward slide, and was hurled
+aboard more or less _en masse_ by the fierce velocity of his heavy-laden
+wheelbarrow. Amidst the confusion and hazard of this feat a procession
+of other habitans marched aboard, each one bearing under his arm a
+coffin-shaped wooden box. The rising fear of Colonel Ellison, that these
+boxes represented the loss of the whole infant population of Ha-Ha Bay,
+was checked by the reflection that the region could not have produced so
+many children, and calmed altogether by the purser, who said that they
+were full of huckleberries, and that Colonel Ellison could have as many
+as he liked for fifteen cents a bushel. This gave him a keen sense of
+the poverty of the land, and he bought of the boys who came aboard such
+abundance of wild red raspberries, in all manner of birch-bark canoes
+and goblets and cornucopias, that he was obliged to make presents of
+them to the very dealers whose stock he had exhausted, and he was in
+treaty with the local half-wit--very fine, with a hunchback, and a
+massive wen on one side of his head--to take charity in the wild fruits
+of his native province, when the crowd about him was gently opened by a
+person who advanced with a flourishing bow and a sprightly "Good
+morning, good morning, sir!" "How do you do?" asked Colonel Ellison; but
+the other, intent on business, answered, "I am the only person at Ha-Ha
+Bay who speaks English, and I have come to ask if you would not like to
+make a promenade in my horse and buggy upon the mountain before
+breakfast. You shall be gone as long as you will for one shilling and
+sixpence. I will show you all that there is to be seen about the place,
+and the beautiful view of the bay from the top of the mountain. But it
+is elegant, you know, I can assure you."
+
+The speaker was so fluent of his English, he had such an audacious,
+wide-branching mustache, such a twinkle in his left eye,--which wore its
+lid in a careless, slouching fashion,--that the heart of man naturally
+clove to him; and Colonel Ellison agreed on the spot to make the
+proposed promenade, for himself and both his ladies, of whom he went
+joyfully in search. He found them at the stern of the boat, admiring the
+wild scenery, and looking
+
+    "Fresh as the morn and as the season fair."
+
+He was not a close observer, and of his wife's wardrobe he had the
+ignorance of a good husband, who, as soon as the pang of paying for her
+dresses is past, forgets whatever she has; but he could not help seeing
+that some gayeties of costume which he had dimly associated with his
+wife now enhanced the charms of his cousin's nice little face and
+figure. A scarf of lively hue carelessly tied about the throat to keep
+off the morning chill, a prettier ribbon, a more stylish jacket than
+Miss Ellison owned,--what do I know?--an air of preparation for battle,
+caught the colonel's eye, and a conscious red stole responsive into
+Kitty's cheek.
+
+"Kitty," said he, "don't you let yourself be made a goose of."
+
+"I hope she won't--by _you_!" retorted his wife, "and I'll thank you,
+Colonel Ellison, not to be a Betty, whatever you are. I don't think it's
+manly to be always noticing ladies' clothes."
+
+"Who said anything about clothes?" demanded the colonel, taking his
+stand upon the letter.
+
+"Well, don't _you_, at any rate. Yes, I'd like to ride, of all things;
+and we've time enough, for breakfast isn't ready till half past eight.
+Where's the carriage?"
+
+The only English scholar at Ha-Ha Bay had taken the light wraps of the
+ladies and was moving off with them. "This way, this way," he said,
+waving his hand towards a larger number of vehicles on the shore than
+could have been reasonably attributed to Ha-Ha Bay. "I hope you won't
+object to having another passenger with you? There's plenty of room for
+all. He seems a very nice, gentlemanly person," said he, with a queer,
+patronizing graciousness which he had no doubt caught from his English
+patrons.
+
+"The more the merrier," answered Colonel Ellison, and "Not in the
+least!" said his wife, not meaning the proverb. Her eye had swept the
+whole array of vehicles and had found them all empty, save one, in which
+she detected the blamelessly coated back of Mr. Arbuton. But I ought
+perhaps to explain Mrs. Ellison's motives better than they can be made
+to appear in her conduct. She cared nothing for Mr. Arbuton; and she had
+no logical wish to see Kitty in love with him. But here were two young
+people thrown somewhat romantically together; Mrs. Ellison was a born
+match-maker, and to have refrained from promoting their better
+acquaintance in the interest of abstract matrimony was what never could
+have entered into her thought or desire. Her whole being closed for the
+time about this purpose; her heart, always warm towards Kitty,--whom she
+admired with a sort of generous frenzy,--expanded with all kinds of
+lovely designs; in a word, every dress she had she would instantly have
+bestowed upon that worshipful creature who was capable of adding another
+marriage to the world. I hope the reader finds nothing vulgar or
+unbecoming in this, for I do not; it was an enthusiasm, pure and simple,
+a beautiful and unselfish abandon; and I am sure men ought to be sorry
+that they are not worthier to be favored by it. Ladies have often to
+lament in the midst of their finesse that, really, no man is deserving
+the fate they devote themselves to prepare for him, or, in other words,
+that women cannot marry women.
+
+I am not going to be so rash as try to depict Mrs. Ellison's arts, for
+then, indeed, I should make her appear the clumsy conspirator she was
+not, and should merely convict myself of ignorance of such matters.
+Whether Mr. Arbuton was ever aware of them, I am not sure: as a man he
+was, of course, obtuse and blind; but then, on the other hand, he had
+seen far more of the world than Mrs. Ellison, and she may have been
+clear as day to him. Probably, though, he did not detect any design; he
+could not have conceived of such a thing in a person with whom he had
+been so irregularly made acquainted, and to whom he felt himself so
+hopelessly superior. A film of ice such as in autumn you find casing the
+still pools early in the frosty mornings had gathered upon his manner
+over night; but it thawed under the greetings of the others, and he
+jumped actively out of the vehicle to offer the ladies their choice of
+seats. When all was arranged he found himself at Mrs. Ellison's side,
+for Kitty had somewhat eagerly climbed to the front seat with the
+colonel. In these circumstances it was pure zeal that sustained Mrs.
+Ellison in the flattering constancy with which she babbled on to Mr.
+Arbuton and refrained from openly resenting Kitty's contumacy.
+
+As the wagon began to ascend the hill, the road was so rough that the
+springs smote together with pitiless jolts, and the ladies uttered some
+irrepressible moans. "Never mind, my dear," said the colonel, turning
+about to his wife, "we've got all the English there is at Ha-Ha Bay, any
+way." Whereupon the driver gave him a wink of sudden liking and
+good-fellowship. At the same time his tongue was loosed, and he began to
+talk of himself. "You see my dog, how he leaps at the horse's nose? He
+is a moose-dog, and keeps himself in practice of catching the moose by
+the nose. You ought to come in the hunting season. I could furnish you
+with Indians and everything you need to hunt with. I am a dealer in wild
+beasts, you know, and I must keep prepared to take them."
+
+"Wild beasts?"
+
+"Yes, for Barnum and the other showmen. I deal in deer, wolf, bear,
+beaver, moose, cariboo, wild-cat, link--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Link--link! You say deer for deers, and link for lynx, don't you?"
+
+"Certainly," answered the unblushing colonel. "Are there many link about
+here?"
+
+"Not many, and they are a very expensive animal. I have been shamefully
+treated in a link that I have sold to a Boston showman. It was a
+difficult beast to take; bit my Indian awfully; and Mr. Doolittle would
+not give the price he promised."
+
+"What an outrage!"
+
+"Yes, but it was not so bad as it might have been. He wanted the money
+back afterwards; the link died in about two weeks," said the dealer in
+wild animals, with a smile that curled his mustache into his ears, and a
+glance at Colonel Ellison. "He may have been bruised, I suppose. He may
+have been homesick. Perhaps he was never a very strong link. The link is
+a curious animal, miss," he said to Kitty, in conclusion.
+
+They had been slowly climbing the mountain road, from which, on either
+hand, the pasturelands fell away in long, irregular knolls and hollows.
+The tops were quite barren, but in the little vales, despite the stones,
+a short grass grew very thick and tenderly green, and groups of kine
+tinkled their soft bells in a sweet, desultory assonance as they cropped
+the herbage. Below, the bay filled the oval of the hills with its sunny
+expanse, and the white steamer, where she lay beside the busy wharf, and
+the black lumber-ships, gave their variety to the pretty scene, which
+was completed by the picturesque villages on the shore. It was a very
+simple sight, but somehow very touching, as if the soft spectacle were
+but a respite from desolation and solitude; as indeed it was.
+
+Mr. Arbuton must have been talking of travel elsewhere, for now he said
+to Mrs. Ellison, "This looks like a bit of Norway; the bay yonder might
+very well be a fjord of the Northern sea."
+
+Mrs. Ellison murmured her sense of obligation to the bay, the fjord, and
+Mr. Arbuton, for their complaisance, and Kitty remembered that he had
+somewhat snubbed her the night before for attributing any suggestive
+grace to the native scenery. "Then you've really found something in an
+American landscape. I suppose we ought to congratulate it," she said, in
+smiling enjoyment of her triumph.
+
+The colonel looked at her with eyes of humorous question; Mrs. Ellison
+looked blank; and Mr. Arbuton, having quite forgotten what he had said
+to provoke this comment now, looked puzzled and answered nothing: for he
+had this trait also in common with the sort of Englishman for whom he
+was taken, that he never helped out your conversational venture, but if
+he failed to respond inwardly, left you with your unaccepted remark upon
+your hands, as it were. In his silence, Kitty fell a prey to very evil
+thoughts of him, for it made her harmless sally look like a blundering
+attack upon him. But just then the driver came to her rescue; he said,
+"Gentlemen and ladies, this is the end of the mountain promenade," and,
+turning his horse's head, drove rapidly back to the village.
+
+At the foot of the hill they came again to the church, and his
+passengers wanted to get out and look into it. "O certainly," said he,
+"it isn't finished yet, but you can say as many prayers as you like in
+it."
+
+The church was decent and clean, like most Canadian churches, and at
+this early hour there was a good number of the villagers at their
+devotions. The lithographic pictures of the stations to Calvary were, of
+course, on its walls, and there was the ordinary tawdriness of paint and
+carving about the high altar.
+
+"I don't like to see these things," said Mrs. Ellison. "It really seems
+to savor of idolatry. Don't you think so, Mr. Arbuton?"
+
+"Well, I don't know. I doubt if they're the sort of people to be hurt by
+it."
+
+"They need a good stout faith in cold climates, I can tell you," said
+the colonel. "It helps to keep them warm. The broad church would be too
+full of draughts up here. They want something snug and tight. Just
+imagine one of these poor devils listening to a liberal sermon about
+birds and fruits and flowers and beautiful sentiments, and then driving
+home over the hills with the mercury thirty degrees below zero! He
+couldn't stand it."
+
+"Yes, yes, certainly," said Mr. Arbuton, and looked about him with an
+eye of cold, uncompassionate inspection, as if he were trying it by a
+standard of taste, and, on the whole, finding the poor little church
+vulgar.
+
+When they mounted to their places again, the talk fell entirely to the
+colonel, who, as his wont was, got what information he could out of the
+driver. It appeared, in spite of his theory, that they were not all good
+Catholics at Ha-Ha Bay. "This chap, for example," said the Frenchman,
+touching himself on the breast and using the slang he must have picked
+up from American travellers, "is no Catholic,--not much! He has made too
+many studies to care for religion. There's a large French party, sir, in
+Canada, that's opposed to the priests and in favor of annexation."
+
+He satisfied the colonel's utmost curiosity, discoursing, as he drove by
+the log-built cottages which were now and then sheathed in birch-bark,
+upon the local affairs, and the character and history of such of his
+fellow-villagers as they met. He knew the pretty girls upon the street
+and saluted them by name, interrupting himself with these courtesies in
+the lecture he was giving the colonel on life at Ha-Ha Bay. There was
+only one brick house (which he had built himself, but had been obliged
+to sell in a season unfavorable for wild beasts), and the other edifices
+dropped through the social scale to some picturesque barns thatched with
+straw. These he excused to his Americans, but added that the ungainly
+thatch was sometimes useful in saving the lives of the cattle toward the
+end of an unusually long, hard winter.
+
+"And the people," asked the colonel, "what do they do in the winter to
+pass the time?"
+
+"Draw the wood, smoke the pipe, court the ladies.--But wouldn't you like
+to see the inside of one of our poor cottages? I shall be very proud to
+have you look at mine, and to have you drink a glass of milk from my
+cows. I am sorry that I cannot offer you brandy, but there's none to be
+bought in the place."
+
+"Don't speak of it! For an eye-opener there is nothing like a glass of
+milk," gayly answered the colonel.
+
+They entered the best room of the house,--wide, low-ceiled, dimly lit by
+two small windows, and fortified against the winter by a huge Canada
+stove of cast-iron. It was rude but neat, and had an air of decent
+comfort. Through the window appeared a very little vegetable garden with
+a border of the hardiest flowers. "The large beans there," explained the
+host, "are for soup and coffee. My corn," he said, pointing out some
+rows of dwarfish maize, "has escaped the early August frosts, and so I
+expect to have some roasting-ears yet this summer."
+
+"Well, it isn't exactly what you'd call an inviting climate, is it?"
+asked the colonel.
+
+The Canadian seemed a hard little man, but he answered now with a kind
+of pathos, "It's cruel! I came here when it was all bush. Twenty years I
+have lived here, and it has not been worth while. If it was to do over
+again, I should rather not live anywhere. I was born in Quebec," he
+said, as if to explain that he was used to mild climates, and began to
+tell of some events of his life at Ha-Ha Bay. "I wish you were going to
+stay here awhile with me. You wouldn't find it so bad in the
+summer-time, I can assure you. There are bears in the bush, sir," he
+said to the colonel, "and you might easily kill one."
+
+"But then I should be helping to spoil your trade in wild beasts,"
+replied the colonel, laughing.
+
+Mr. Arbuton looked like one who might be very tired of this. He made no
+sign of interest either in the early glooms and privations or the summer
+bears of Ha-Ha Bay. He sat in the quaint parlor, with his hat on his
+knee, in the decorous and patient attitude of a gentleman making a call.
+
+He had no feeling, Kitty said to herself; but that is a matter about
+which we can easily be wrong. It was rather to be said of Mr. Arbuton
+that he had always shrunk from knowledge of things outside of a very
+narrow world, and that he had not a ready imagination. Moreover, he had
+a personal dislike, as I may call it, of poverty; and he did not enjoy
+this poverty as she did, because it was strange and suggestive, though
+doubtless he would have done as much to relieve distress.
+
+"Rather too much of his autobiography," he said to Kitty, as he waited
+outside the door with her, while the Canadian quieted his dog, which was
+again keeping himself in practice of catching the moose by making
+vicious leaps at the horse's nose. "The egotism of that kind of people
+is always so aggressive. But I suppose he's in the habit of throwing
+himself upon the sympathy of summer visitors in this way. You can't
+offer a man so little as shilling and sixpence who's taken you into his
+confidence. Did you find enough that was novel in his place to justify
+him in bringing us here, Miss Ellison?" he asked with an air he had of
+taking you of course to be of his mind, and which equally offended you
+whether you were so or not.
+
+Every face that they had seen in their drive had told its pathetic story
+to Kitty; every cottage that they passed she had entered in thought, and
+dreamed out its humble drama. What their host had said gave breath and
+color to her fancies of the struggle of life there, and she was startled
+and shocked when this cold doubt was cast upon the sympathetic tints of
+her picture. She did not know what to say at first; she looked at Mr.
+Arbuton with a sudden glance of embarrassment and trouble; then she
+answered, "I was very much interested. I don't agree with you, I
+believe"; which, when she heard it, seemed a resentful little speech,
+and made her willing for some occasion to soften its effect. But nothing
+occurred to her during the brief drive back to the boat, save the fact
+that the morning air was delicious.
+
+"Yes, but rather cool," said Mr. Arbuton, whose feelings apparently had
+not needed any balm; and the talk fell again to the others.
+
+On the pier he helped her down from the wagon, for the colonel was
+intent on something the driver was saying, and then offered his hand to
+Mrs. Ellison.
+
+She sprang from her place, but stumbled slightly, and when she touched
+the ground, "I believe I turned my foot a little," she said with a
+laugh. "It's nothing, of course," and fainted in his arms.
+
+Kitty gave a cry of alarm, and the next instant the colonel had relieved
+Mr. Arbuton. It was a scene, and nothing could have annoyed him more
+than this tumult which poor Mrs. Ellison's misfortune occasioned among
+the bystanding habitans and deck-hands, and the passengers eagerly
+craning forward over the bulwarks, and running ashore to see what the
+matter was. Few men know just how to offer those little offices of
+helpfulness which such emergencies demand, and Mr. Arbuton could do
+nothing after he was rid of his burden; he hovered anxiously and
+uselessly about, while Mrs. Ellison was carried to an airy position on
+the bow of the boat, where in a few minutes he had the great
+satisfaction of seeing her open her eyes. It was not the moment for him
+to speak, and he walked somewhat guiltily away with the dispersing
+crowd.
+
+Mrs. Ellison addressed her first words to pale Kitty at her side. "You
+can have all my things, now," she said, as if it were a clause in her
+will, and perhaps it had been her last thought before unconsciousness.
+
+"Why, Fanny," cried Kitty, with an hysterical laugh, "you're not going
+to die! A sprained ankle isn't fatal!"
+
+"No; but I've heard that a person with a sprained ankle can't put their
+foot to the ground for weeks; and I shall only want a dressing-gown, you
+know, to lie on the sofa in." With that, Mrs. Ellison placed her hand
+tenderly on Kitty's head, like a mother wondering what will become of a
+helpless child during her disability; in fact she was mentally weighing
+the advantages of her wardrobe, which Kitty would now fully enjoy,
+against the loss of the friendly strategy which she would now lack.
+Helpless to decide the matter, she heaved a sigh.
+
+"But, Fanny, you won't expect to travel in a dressing-gown."
+
+"Indeed, I wish I knew whether I _could_ travel in _anything_ or not.
+But the next twenty-four hours will show. If it swells up, I shall have
+to rest awhile at Quebec; and if it doesn't, there may be something
+internal. I've read of accidents when the person thought they were
+perfectly well and comfortable, and the first thing they knew they were
+in a very dangerous state. That's the worst of these internal injuries:
+you never can tell. Not that I think there's anything of that kind the
+matter with me. But a few days' rest won't do any harm, whatever
+happens; the stores in Quebec are quite as good and a little cheaper
+than in Montreal; and I could go about in a carriage, you know, and put
+in the time as well in one place as the other. I'm sure we could get on
+very pleasantly there; and the colonel needn't be home for a month yet.
+I suppose that I could hobble into the stores on a crutch."
+
+Whilst Mrs. Ellison's monologue ran on with scarcely a break from Kitty,
+her husband was gone to fetch her a cup of tea and such other light
+refreshment as a lady may take after a swoon. When he returned she
+bethought herself of Mr. Arbuton, who, having once come back to see if
+all was going well, had vanished again.
+
+"Why, our friend Boston is bearing up under his share of the morning's
+work like a hero--or a lady with a sprained ankle," said the colonel as
+he arranged the provision. "To see the havoc he's making in the ham and
+eggs and chiccory is to be convinced that there is no appetizer like
+regret for the sufferings of others."
+
+"Why, and here's poor Kitty not had a bite yet!" cried Mrs. Ellison.
+"Kitty, go off at once and get your breakfast. Put on my--"
+
+"O, _don't_, Fanny, or I can't go; and I'm really very hungry."
+
+"Well, I won't then," said Mrs. Ellison, seeing the rainy cloud in
+Kitty's eyes. "Go just as you are, and don't mind me." And so Kitty
+went, gathering courage at every pace, and sitting down opposite Mr.
+Arbuton with a vivid color to be sure, but otherwise lion-bold. He had
+been upbraiding the stars that had thrust him further and further at
+every step into the intimacy of these people, as he called them to
+himself. It was just twenty-four hours, he reflected, since he had met
+them, and resolved to have nothing to do with them, and in that time the
+young lady had brought him under the necessity of apologizing for a
+blunder of her own; he had played the eavesdropper to her talk; he had
+sentimentalized the midnight hour with her; they had all taken a morning
+ride together; and he had ended by having Mrs. Ellison sprain her ankle
+and faint in his arms. It was outrageous; and what made it worse was
+that decency obliged him to take henceforth a regretful, deprecatory
+attitude towards Mrs. Ellison, whom he liked least among these people.
+So he sat vindictively eating an enormous breakfast, in a sort of angry
+abstraction, from which Kitty's coming roused him to say that he hoped
+Mrs. Ellison was better.
+
+"O, very much! It's just a sprain."
+
+"A sprain may be a very annoying thing," said Mr. Arbuton dismally.
+"Miss Ellison," he cried, "I've been nothing but an affliction to your
+party since I came on board this boat!"
+
+"Do you think evil genius of our party would be too harsh a term?"
+suggested Kitty.
+
+"Not in the least; it would be a mere euphemism,--base flattery, in
+fact. Call me something worse."
+
+"I can't think of anything. I must leave you to your own conscience. It
+was a pity to end our ride in that way; it would have been such a
+pleasant ride!" And Kitty took heart from his apparent mood to speak of
+some facts of the morning that had moved her fancy. "What a strange
+little nest it is up here among these half-thawed hills! and imagine the
+winter, the fifteen or twenty months of it, they must have every year. I
+could almost have shed tears over that patch of corn that had escaped
+the early August frosts. I suppose this is a sort of Indian summer that
+we are enjoying now, and that the cold weather will set in after a week
+or two. My cousin and I thought that Tadoussac was somewhat retired and
+composed last night, but I'm sure that I shall see it in its true light,
+as a metropolis, going back. I'm afraid that the turmoil and bustle of
+Eriecreek, when I get home--"
+
+"Eriecreek?--when you got home?--I thought you lived at Milwaukee."
+
+"O no! It's my cousins who live at Milwaukee. I live at Eriecreek, New
+York State."
+
+"Oh!" Mr. Arbuton looked blank and not altogether pleased. Milwaukee was
+bad enough, though he understood that it was largely peopled from New
+England, and had a great German element, which might account for the
+fact that these people were not quite barbaric. But this Eriecreek, New
+York State! "I don't think I've heard of it," he said.
+
+"It's a small place," observed Kitty, "and I believe it isn't noted for
+anything in particular; it's not even on any railroad. It's in the
+north-west part of the State."
+
+"Isn't it in the oil-regions?" groped Mr. Arbuton.
+
+"Why, the oil-regions are rather migratory, you know. It used to be in
+the oil-regions; but the oil was pumped out, and then the oil-regions
+gracefully withdrew and left the cheese-regions and grape-regions to
+come back and take possession of the old derricks and the rusty boilers.
+You might suppose from the appearance of the meadows, that all the
+boilers that ever blew up had come down in the neighborhood of
+Eriecreek. And every field has its derrick standing just as the last
+dollar or the last drop of oil left it."
+
+Mr. Arbuton brought his fancy to bear upon Eriecreek, and wholly failed
+to conceive of it. He did not like the notion of its being thrust within
+the range of his knowledge; and he resented its being the home of Miss
+Ellison, whom he was beginning to accept as a not quite comprehensible
+yet certainly agreeable fact, though he still had a disposition to cast
+her off as something incredible. He asked no further about Eriecreek,
+and presently she rose and went to join her relatives, and he went to
+smoke his cigar, and to ponder upon the problem presented to him in this
+young girl from whose locality and conjecturable experiences he was at
+loss how to infer her as he found her here.
+
+She had a certain self-reliance mingling with an innocent trust of
+others which Mrs. Isabel March had described to her husband as a charm
+potent to make everybody sympathetic and good-natured, but which it
+would not be easy to account for to Mr. Arbuton. In part it was a
+natural gift, and partly it came from mere ignorance of the world; it
+was the unsnubbed fearlessness of a heart which did not suspect a sense
+of social difference in others, or imagine itself misprized for anything
+but a fault. For such a false conception of her relations to polite
+society, Kitty's Uncle Jack was chiefly to blame. In the fierce
+democracy of his revolt from his Virginian traditions he had taught his
+family that a belief in any save intellectual and moral distinctions was
+a mean and cruel superstition; he had contrived to fix this idea so
+deeply in the education of his children, that it gave a coloring to
+their lives, and Kitty, when her turn came, had the effect of it in the
+character of those about her. In fact she accepted his extreme theories
+of equality to a degree that delighted her uncle, who, having held them
+many years, was growing perhaps a little languid in their tenure and was
+glad to have his grasp strengthened by her faith. Socially as well as
+politically Eriecreek was almost a perfect democracy, and there was
+little in Kitty's circumstances to contradict the doctor's teachings.
+The brief visits which she had made to Buffalo and Erie, and, since the
+colonel's marriage, to Milwaukee, had not sufficed to undeceive her; she
+had never suffered slight save from the ignorant and uncouth; she
+innocently expected that in people of culture she should always find
+community of feeling and ideas; and she had met Mr. Arbuton all the more
+trustfully because as a Bostonian he must be cultivated.
+
+In the secluded life which she led perforce at Eriecreek there was an
+abundance of leisure, which she bestowed upon books at an age when most
+girls are sent to school. The doctor had a good taste of an
+old-fashioned kind in literature, and he had a library pretty well
+stocked with the elderly English authors, poets and essayists and
+novelists, and here and there an historian, and these Kitty read
+childlike, liking them at the time in a certain way, and storing up in
+her mind things that she did not understand for the present, but whose
+beauty and value dawned upon her from time to time, as she grew older.
+But of far more use and pleasure to her than these now somewhat mouldy
+classics were the more modern books of her cousin Charles,--that pride
+and hope of his father's heart, who had died the year before she came to
+Eriecreek. He was named after her own father, and it was as if her Uncle
+Jack found both his son and his brother in her again. When her taste for
+reading began to show itself in force, the old man one day unlocked a
+certain bookcase in a little upper room, and gave her the key, saying,
+with a broken pride and that queer Virginian pomp which still clung to
+him, "This was my son's, who would one day have been a great writer; now
+it is yours." After that the doctor would pick up the books out of this
+collection which Kitty was reading and had left lying about the rooms,
+and look into them a little way. Sometimes he fell asleep over them;
+sometimes when he opened on a page pencilled with marginal notes, he
+would put the volume gently down and go very quickly out of the room.
+
+"Kitty, I reckon you'd better not leave poor Charley's books around
+where Uncle Jack can get at them," one of the girls, Virginia or Rachel,
+would say; "I don't believe he cares much for those writers, and the
+sight of the books just tries him." So Kitty kept the books, and herself
+for the most part with them, in the upper chamber which had been Charles
+Ellison's room, and where, amongst the witnesses of the dead boy's
+ambitious dreams, she grew dreamer herself and seemed to inherit with
+his earthly place his own fine and gentle spirit.
+
+The doctor, as his daughter suggested, did not care much for the modern
+authors in whom his son had delighted. Like many another simple and
+pure-hearted man, he thought that since Pope there had been no great
+poet but Byron, and he could make nothing out of Tennyson and Browning,
+or the other contemporary English poets. Amongst the Americans he had a
+great respect for Whittier, but he preferred Lowell to the rest because
+he had written The Biglow Papers, and he never would allow that the last
+series was half so good as the first. These and the other principal
+poets of our nation and language Kitty inherited from her cousin, as
+well as a full stock of the contemporary novelists and romancers, whom
+she liked better than the poets on the whole. She had also the advantage
+of the magazines and reviews which used to come to him, and the house
+over-flowed with newspapers of every kind, from the Eriecreek Courier to
+the New York Tribune. What with the coming and going of the eccentric
+visitors, and this continual reading, and her rides about the country
+with her Uncle Jack, Kitty's education, such as it was, went on very
+actively and with the effect, at least, to give her a great liveliness
+of mind and several decided opinions. Where it might have warped her out
+of natural simplicity, and made her conceited, the keen and wholesome
+airs which breathed continually in the Ellison household came in to
+restore her. There was such kindness in this discipline, that she never
+could remember when it wounded her; it was part of the gayety of those
+times when she would sit down with the girls, and they took up some work
+together, and rattled on in a free, wild, racy talk, with an edge of
+satire for whoever came near, a fantastic excess in its drollery, and
+just a touch of native melancholy tingeing it. The last queer guest,
+some neighborhood gossip, some youthful folly or pretentiousness of
+Kitty's, some trait of their own, some absurdity of the boys if they
+happened to be at home, and came lounging in, were the themes out of
+which they contrived such jollity as never was, save when in Uncle
+Jack's presence they fell upon some characteristic action or theory of
+his and turned it into endless ridicule.
+
+But of such people, of such life, Mr. Arbuton could have made nothing if
+he had known them. In many things he was an excellent person, and
+greatly to be respected for certain qualities. He was very sincere; his
+mind had a singular purity and rectitude; he was a scrupulously just
+person so far as he knew. He had traits that would have fitted him very
+well for the career he had once contemplated, and he had even made some
+preliminary studies for the ministry. But the very generosity of his
+creed perplexed him, his mislikers said; contending that he could never
+have got on with the mob of the redeemed. "Arbuton," said a fat young
+fellow, the supposed wit of the class, "thinks there _are_ persons of
+low extraction in heaven; but he doesn't like the idea." And Mr. Arbuton
+did not like the speaker very well, either, nor any of his poorer
+fellow-students, whose gloveless and unfashionable poverty, and meagre
+board and lodgings, and general hungry dependence upon pious bequests
+and neighborhood kindnesses, offended his instincts. "So he's given it
+up, has he?" moralized the same wit, upon his retirement. "If Arbuton
+could have been a divinely commissioned apostle to the best society, and
+been obliged to save none but well-connected, old-established, and
+cultivated souls, he might have gone into the ministry." This was a
+coarse construction of the truth, but it was not altogether a
+perversion. It was long ago that he had abandoned the thought of the
+ministry, and he had since travelled, and read law, and become a man of
+society and of clubs; but he still kept the traits that had seemed to
+make his vocation clear. On the other hand he kept the prejudices that
+were imagined to have disqualified him. He was an exclusive by training
+and by instinct. He gave ordinary humanity credit for a certain measure
+of sensibility, and it is possible that if he had known more kinds of
+men, he would have recognized merits and excellences which did not now
+exist for him; but I do not think he would have liked them. His doubt of
+these Western people was the most natural, if not the most justifiable
+thing in the world, and for Kitty, if he could have known all about her,
+I do not see how he could have believed in her at all. As it was, he
+went in search of her party, when he had smoked his cigar, and found
+them on the forward promenade. She had left him in quite a lenient mood,
+although, as she perceived with amusement, he had done nothing to merit
+it, except give her cousin a sprained ankle. At the moment of his
+reappearance, Mrs. Ellison had been telling Kitty that she thought it
+was beginning to swell a little, and so it could not be anything
+internal; and Kitty had understood that she meant her ankle as well as
+if she had said so, and had sorrowed and rejoiced over her, and the
+colonel had been inculpated for the whole affair. This made Mr.
+Arbuton's excuses rather needless, though they were most graciously
+received.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+ON THE WAY BACK TO QUEBEC.
+
+
+By this time the boat was moving down the river, and every one was alive
+to the scenery. The procession of the pine-clad, rounded heights on
+either shore began shortly after Ha-Ha Bay had disappeared behind a
+curve, and it hardly ceased, save at one point, before the boat
+re-entered the St. Lawrence. The shores of the stream are almost
+uninhabited. The hills rise from the water's edge, and if ever a narrow
+vale divides them, it is but to open drearier solitudes to the eye. In
+such a valley would stand a saw-mill, and huddled about it a few poor
+huts, while a friendless road, scarce discernible from the boat, wound
+up from the river through the valley, and led to wildernesses all the
+forlorner for the devastation of their forests. Now and then an island,
+rugged as the shores, broke the long reaches of the grim river with its
+massive rock and dark evergreen, and seemed in the distance to forbid
+escape from those dreary waters, over which no bird flew, and in which
+it was incredible any fish swam.
+
+Mrs. Ellison, with her foot comfortably and not ungracefully supported
+on a stool, was in so little pain as to be looking from time to time at
+one of the guide-books which the colonel had lavished upon his party,
+and which she was disposed to hold to very strict account for any
+excesses of description.
+
+"It says here that the water of the Saguenay is as black as ink. Do
+_you_ think it is, Richard?"
+
+"It looks so."
+
+"Well, but if you took some up in your hand?"
+
+"Perhaps it wouldn't be as black as the best Maynard and Noyes, but it
+would be black enough for all practical purposes."
+
+"Maybe," suggested Kitty, "the guide-book means the kind that is light
+blue at first, but 'becomes a deep black on exposure to the air,' as the
+label says."
+
+"What do you think, Mr. Arbuton?" asked Mrs. Ellison with unabated
+anxiety.
+
+"Well, really, I don't know," said Mr. Arbuton, who thought it a very
+trivial kind of talk, "I can't say, indeed. I haven't taken any of it up
+in my hand."
+
+"That's true," said Mrs. Ellison gravely, with an accent of reproval for
+the others who had not thought of so simple a solution of the problem,
+"very true."
+
+The colonel looked into her face with an air of well-feigned alarm. "You
+don't think the sprain has gone to your head, Fanny?" he asked, and
+walked away, leaving Mr. Arbuton to the ladies. Mrs. Ellison did not
+care for this or any other gibe, if she but served her own purposes; and
+now, having made everybody laugh and given the conversation a lively
+turn, she was as perfectly content as if she had not been herself an
+offering to the cause of cheerfulness. She was, indeed, equal to any
+sacrifice in the enterprise she had undertaken, and would not only have
+given Kitty all her worldly goods, but would have quite effaced herself
+to further her own designs upon Mr. Arbuton. She turned again to her
+guide-book, and left the young people to continue the talk in unbroken
+gayety. They at once became serious, as most people do after a hearty
+laugh, which, if you think, seems always to have something strange and
+sad in it. But besides, Kitty was oppressed by the coldness that seemed
+perpetually to hover in Mr. Arbuton's atmosphere, while she was
+interested by his fastidious good looks and his blameless manners and
+his air of a world different from any she had hitherto known. He was one
+of those men whose perfection makes you feel guilty of misdemeanor
+whenever they meet you, and whose greeting turns your honest good-day
+coarse and common; even Kitty's fearless ignorance and more than Western
+disregard of dignities were not proof against him. She had found it easy
+to talk with Mrs. March as she did with her cousin at home: she liked to
+be frank and gay in her parley, to jest and to laugh and to make
+harmless fun, and to sentimentalize in a half-earnest way; she liked to
+be with Mr. Arbuton, but now she did not see how she could take her
+natural tone with him. She wondered at her daring lightness at the
+breakfast-table; she waited for him to say something, and he said, with
+a glance at the gray heaven that always overhangs the Saguenay, that it
+was beginning to rain, and unfurled the slender silk umbrella which
+harmonized so perfectly with the London effect of his dress, and held it
+over her. Mrs. Ellison sat within the shelter of the projecting roof,
+and diligently perused her book with her eyes, and listened to their
+talk.
+
+"The great drawback to this sort of thing in America," continued Mr.
+Arbuton, "is that there is no human interest about the scenery, fine as
+it is."
+
+"Why, I don't know," said Kitty, "there was that little settlement round
+the saw-mill. Can't you imagine any human interest in the lives of the
+people there? It seems to me that one might make almost anything out of
+them. Suppose, for example, that the owner of that mill was a
+disappointed man who had come here to bury the wreck of his life
+in--sawdust?"
+
+"O, yes! That sort of thing; certainly. But I didn't mean that, I meant
+something historical. There is no past, no atmosphere, no traditions,
+you know."
+
+"O, but the Saguenay _has_ a tradition," said Kitty. "You know that a
+party of the first explorers left their comrades at Tadoussac, and came
+up the Saguenay three hundred years ago, and never were seen or heard of
+again. I think it's so in keeping with the looks of the river. The
+Saguenay would never tell a secret."
+
+"Um!" uttered Mr. Arbuton, as if he were not quite sure that it was the
+Saguenay's place to have a legend of this sort, and disposed to snub the
+legend because the Saguenay had it. After a little silence, he began to
+speak of famous rivers abroad.
+
+"I suppose," Kitty said, "the Rhine has traditions enough, hasn't it?"
+
+"Yes," he answered, "but I think the Rhine rather overdoes it. You can't
+help feeling, you know, that it's somewhat melodramatic and--common.
+Have you ever seen the Rhine?"
+
+"O, no! This is almost the first I've seen of anything. Perhaps," she
+added, demurely, yet with a tremor at finding herself about to make
+light of Mr. Arbuton, "if I had had too much of tradition on the Rhine I
+should want more of it on the Saguenay."
+
+"Why, you must allow there's a golden mean in everything, Miss Ellison,"
+said her companion with a lenient laugh, not feeling it disagreeable to
+be made light of by her.
+
+"Yes; and I'm afraid we're going to find Cape Trinity and Cape Eternity
+altogether too big when we come to them. Don't you think eighteen
+hundred feet excessively high for a feature of river scenery?"
+
+Mr. Arbuton really did have an objection to the exaggerations of nature
+on this continent, and secretly thought them in bad taste, but he had
+never formulated his feeling. He was not sure but it was ridiculous, now
+that it was suggested, and yet the possibility was too novel to be
+entertained without suspicion.
+
+However, when after a while the rumor of their approach to the great
+objects of the Saguenay journey had spread among the passengers, and
+they began to assemble at points favorable for the enjoyment of the
+spectacle, he was glad to have secured the place he held with Miss
+Ellison, and a sympathetic thrill of excitement passed through his loath
+superiority. The rain ceased as they drew nearer, and the gray clouds
+that had hung so low upon the hills sullenly lifted from them and let
+their growing height he seen. The captain bade his sight-seers look at
+the vast Roman profile that showed itself upon the rock, and then he
+pointed out the wonderful Gothic arch, the reputed doorway of an
+unexplored cavern, under which an upright shaft of stone had stood for
+ages statue-like, till not many winters ago the frost heaved it from its
+base, and it plunged headlong down through the ice into the unfathomed
+depths below. The unvarying gloom of the pines was lit now by the
+pensive glimmer of birch-trees, and this gray tone gave an indescribable
+sentiment of pathos and of age to the scenery. Suddenly the boat rounded
+the corner of the three steps, each five hundred feet high, in which
+Cape Eternity climbs from the river, and crept in under the naked side
+of the awful cliff. It is sheer rock, springing from the black water,
+and stretching upward with a weary, effort-like aspect, in long impulses
+of stone marked by deep seams from space to space, till, fifteen hundred
+feet in air, its vast brow beetles forward, and frowns with a scattering
+fringe of pines. There are stains of weather and of oozing springs upon
+the front of the cliff, but it is height alone that seems to seize the
+eye, and one remembers afterwards these details, which are indeed so few
+as not properly to enter into the effect. The rock fully justifies its
+attributive height to the eye, which follows the upward rush of the
+mighty acclivity, steep after steep, till it wins the cloud-capt summit,
+when the measureless mass seems to swing and sway overhead, and the
+nerves tremble with the same terror that besets him who looks downward
+from the verge of a lofty precipice. It is wholly grim and stern; no
+touch of beauty relieves the austere majesty of that presence. At the
+foot of Cape Eternity the water is of unknown depth, and it spreads, a
+black expanse, in the rounding hollow of shores of unimaginable wildness
+and desolation, and issues again in its river's course around the base
+of Cape Trinity. This is yet loftier than the sister cliff, but it
+slopes gently backward from the stream, and from foot to crest it is
+heavily clothed with a forest of pines. The woods that hitherto have
+shagged the hills with a stunted and meagre growth, showing long
+stretches scarred by fire, now assume a stately size, and assemble
+themselves compactly upon the side of the mountain, setting their
+serried stems one rank above another, till the summit is crowned with
+the mass of their dark green plumes, dense and soft and beautiful; so
+that the spirit perturbed by the spectacle of the other cliff is calmed
+and assuaged by the serene grandeur of this.
+
+There have been, to be sure, some human agencies at work even under the
+shadow of Cape Eternity to restore the spirit to self-possession, and
+perhaps none turns from it wholly dismayed. Kitty, at any rate, took
+heart from some works of art which the cliff wall displayed near the
+water's edge. One of these was a lively fresco portrait of
+Lieutenant-General Sherman, with the insignia of his rank, and the other
+was an even more striking effigy of General O'Neil, of the Armies of the
+Irish Republic, wearing a threatening aspect, and designed in a bold
+conceit of his presence there as conqueror of Canada in the year 1875.
+Mr. Arbuton was inclined to resent these intrusions upon the sublimity
+of nature, and he could not conceive, without disadvantage to them, how
+Miss Ellison and the colonel should accept them so cheerfully as part of
+the pleasure of the whole. As he listened blankly to their exchange of
+jests he found himself awfully beset by a temptation which one of the
+boat's crew placed before the passengers. This was a bucket full of
+pebbles of inviting size; and the man said, "Now, see which can hit the
+cliff. It's farther than any of you can throw, though it looks so near."
+
+The passengers cast themselves upon the store of missiles, Colonel
+Ellison most actively among them. None struck the cliff, and suddenly
+Mr. Arbuton felt a blind, stupid, irresistible longing to try his
+chance. The spirit of his college days, of his boating and ball-playing
+youth, came upon him. He picked up a pebble, while Kitty opened her eyes
+in a stare of dumb surprise. Then he wheeled and threw it, and as it
+struck against the cliff with a shock that seemed to have broken all the
+windows on the Back Bay, he exulted in a sense of freedom the havoc
+caused him. It was as if for an instant he had rent away the ties of
+custom, thrown off the bonds of social allegiance, broken down and
+trampled upon the conventions which his whole life long he had held so
+dear and respectable. In that moment of frenzy he feared himself capable
+of shaking hands with the shabby Englishman in the Glengarry cap, or of
+asking the whole admiring company of passengers down to the bar. A cry
+of applause had broken from them at his achievement, and he had for the
+first time tasted the sweets of popular favor. Of course a revulsion
+must come, and it must be of a corresponding violence; and the next
+moment Mr. Arbuton hated them all, and most of all Colonel Ellison, who
+had been loudest in his praise. Him he thought for that moment
+everything that was aggressively and intrusively vulgar. But he could
+not utter these friendly impressions, nor is it so easy to withdraw from
+any concession, and he found it impossible to repair his broken
+defences. Destiny had been against him from the beginning, and now why
+should he not strike hands with it for the brief half-day that he was to
+continue in these people's society? In the morning he would part from
+them forever, and in the mean time why should he not try to please and
+be pleased? There might, to be sure, have been many reasons why he
+should not do this; but however the balance stood he now yielded himself
+passively to his fate. He was polite to Mrs. Ellison, he was attentive
+to Kitty, and as far as he could he entered into the fantastic spirit of
+her talk with the colonel. He was not a dull man; he had quite an apt
+wit of his own, and a neat way of saying things; but humor always seemed
+to him something not perfectly well bred; of course he helped to praise
+it in some old-established diner-out, or some woman of good fashion,
+whose _mots_ it was customary to repeat, and he even tolerated it in
+books; but he was at a loss with these people, who looked at life in so
+bizarre a temper, yet without airiness or pretension, nay, with a
+whimsical readiness to acknowledge kindred in every droll or laughable
+thing.
+
+The boat stopped at Tadoussac on her return, and among the spectators
+who came down to the landing was a certain very pretty,
+conscious-looking, silly, bridal-faced young woman,--imaginably the
+belle of the season at that forlorn watering-place,--who before coming
+on board stood awhile attended by a following of those elderly imperial
+and colonial British who heavily flutter round the fair at such resorts.
+She had an air of utterly satisfied vanity, in which there was no harm
+in the world, and when she saw that she had fixed the eyes of the
+shoreward-gazing passengers, it appeared as if she fell into a happy
+trepidation too blissful to be passively borne; she moistened her pretty
+red lips with her tongue, she twitched her mantle, she settled the bow
+at her lovely throat, she bridled and tossed her graceful head.
+
+"What should you do next, Kitty?" asked the colonel, who had been
+sympathetically intent upon all this.
+
+"O, I think I should pat my foot," answered Kitty; and in fact the
+charming simpleton on shore, having perfected her attitude, was tapping
+the ground nervously with the toe of her adorable slipper.
+
+After the boat started, a Canadian lady of ripe age, yet of a vivacity
+not to be reconciled with the notion of the married state, capered
+briskly about among her somewhat stolid and indifferent friends, saying,
+"They're going to fire it as soon as we round the point"; and presently
+a dull boom, as of a small piece of ordnance discharged in the
+neighborhood of the hotel, struck through the gathering fog, and this
+elderly sylph clapped her hands and exulted: "They've fired it, they've
+fired it! and now the captain will blow the whistle in answer." But the
+captain did nothing of the kind, and the lady, after some more girlish
+effervescence, upbraided him for an old owl and an old muff, and so sank
+into such a flat and spiritless calm that she was sorrowful to see.
+
+"Too bad, Mr. Arbuton, isn't it?" said the colonel; and Mr. Arbuton
+listened in vague doubt while Kitty built up with her cousin a touching
+romance for the poor lady, supposed to have spent the one brilliant and
+successful summer of her life at Tadoussac, where her admirers had
+agreed to bemoan her loss in this explosion of gunpowder. They asked him
+if he did not wish the captain _had_ whistled; and "Oh!" shuddered
+Kitty, "doesn't it all make you feel just as if you had been doing it
+yourself?"--a question which he hardly knew how to answer, never having,
+to his knowledge, done a ridiculous thing in his life, much less been
+guilty of such behavior as that of the disappointed lady.
+
+At Cacouna, where the boat stopped to take on the horses and carriages
+of some home-returning sojourners, the pier was a labyrinth of equipages
+of many sorts and sizes, and a herd of bright-hooded, gayly blanketed
+horses gave variety to the human crowd that soaked and steamed in the
+fine, slowly falling rain. A draught-horse was every three minutes
+driven into their midst with tedious iteration as he slowly drew baskets
+of coal up from the sloop unloading at the wharf, and each time they
+closed solidly upon his retreat as if they never expected to see that
+horse again while the world stood. They were idle ladies and gentlemen
+under umbrellas, Indians and habitans taking the rain stolidly erect or
+with shrugged shoulders, and two or three clergymen of the curate type,
+who might have stepped as they were out of any dull English novel. These
+were talking in low voices and putting their hands to their ears to
+catch the replies of the lady-passengers who hung upon the rail, and
+twaddled back as dryly as if there was no moisture in life. All the
+while the safety-valves hissed with the escaping steam, and the boat's
+crew silently toiled with the grooms of the different horses to get the
+equipages on board. With the carriages it was an affair of mere muscle,
+but the horses required to be managed with brain. No sooner had one of
+them placed his fore feet on the gangway plank than he protested by
+backing up over a mass of patient Canadians, carrying with him half a
+dozen grooms and deck-hands. Then his hood was drawn over his eyes, and
+he was blindly walked up and down the pier, and back to the gangway,
+which he knew as soon as he touched it. He pulled, he pranced, he shied,
+he did all that a bad and stubborn horse can do, till at last a groom
+mounted his back, a clump of deck-hands tugged at his bridle, and other
+grooms, tenderly embracing him at different points, pushed, and he was
+thus conveyed on board with mingled affection and ignominy. None of the
+Canadians seemed amused by this; they regarded it with serious composure
+as a fitting decorum, and Mr. Arbuton had no comment to make upon it.
+But at the first embrace bestowed upon the horse by the grooms the
+colonel said absently, "Ah! long-lost brother," and Kitty laughed; and
+as the scruples of each brute were successively overcome, she helped to
+give some grotesque interpretation to the various scenes of the
+melodrama, while Mr. Arbuton stood beside her, and sheltered her with
+his umbrella; and a spice of malice in her heart told her that he viewed
+this drolling, and especially her part in it, with grave misgiving. That
+gave the zest of transgression to her excess, mixed with dismay; for the
+tricksy spirit in her was not a domineering spirit, but was easily
+abashed by the moods of others. She ought not to have laughed at Dick's
+speeches, she soon told herself, much less helped him on. She dreadfully
+feared that she had done something indecorous, and she was pensive and
+silent over it as she moved listlessly about after supper; and she sat
+at last thinking in a dreary sort of perplexity on what had passed
+during the day, which seemed a long one.
+
+The shabby Englishman with his wife and sister were walking up and down
+the cabin. By and by they stopped, and sat down at the table facing
+Kitty; the elder woman, with a civil freedom, addressed her some
+commonplace, and the four were presently in lively talk; for Kitty had
+beamed upon the woman in return, having already longed to know something
+of them. The world was so fresh to her, that she could find delight in
+those poor singing or acting folk, though she had soon to own to herself
+that their talk was not very witty nor very wise, and that the best
+thing about them was their good-nature. The colonel sat at the end of
+the table with a newspaper; Mrs. Ellison had gone to bed; and Kitty was
+beginning to tire of her new acquaintance, and to wonder how she could
+get away from them, when she saw rescue in the eye of Mr. Arbuton as he
+came down to the cabin. She knew he was looking for her; she saw him
+check himself with a start of recognition; then he walked rapidly by the
+group, without glancing at them.
+
+"Brrrr!" said the blond girl, drawing her blue knit shawl about her
+shoulders, "isn't it cold?" and she and her friends laughed.
+
+"O dear!" thought Kitty, "I didn't suppose they were so rude. I'm afraid
+I must say good night," she added aloud, after a little, and stole away
+the most conscience-stricken creature on that boat. She heard those
+people laugh again after she left them.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+MR. ARBUTON'S INSPIRATION.
+
+
+The next morning, when Mr. Arbuton awoke, he found a clear light upon
+the world that he had left wrapped in fog at midnight. A heavy gale was
+blowing, and the wide river was running in seas that made the boat
+stagger in her course, and now and then struck her bows with a force
+that sent the spray from their seething tops into the faces of the
+people on the promenade. The sun, out of rifts of the breaking clouds,
+launched broad splendors across the villages and farms of the level
+landscape and the crests and hollows of the waves; and a certain joy of
+the air penetrated to the guarded consciousness of Mr. Arbuton.
+Involuntarily he looked about for the people he meant to have nothing
+more to do with, that he might appeal to the sympathies of one of them,
+at least, in his sense of such an admirable morning. But a great many
+passengers had come on board, during the night, at Murray Bay, where the
+brief season was ending, and their number hid the Ellisons from him.
+When he went to breakfast, he found some one had taken his seat near
+them, and they did not notice him as he passed by in search of another
+chair. Kitty and the colonel were at table alone, and they both wore
+preoccupied faces. After breakfast he sought them out and asked for Mrs.
+Ellison, who had shared in most of the excitements of the day before,
+helping herself about with a pretty limp, and who certainly had not, as
+her husband phrased it, kept any of the meals waiting.
+
+"Why," said the colonel, "I'm afraid her ankle's worse this morning, and
+that we'll have to lie by at Quebec for a few days, at any rate."
+
+Mr. Arbuton heard this sad news with a cheerful aspect unaccountable in
+one who was concerned at Mrs. Ellison's misfortune. He smiled, when he
+ought to have looked pensive, and he laughed at the colonel's joke when
+the latter added, "Of course, this is a great hardship for my cousin,
+who hates Quebec, and wants to get home to Eriecreek as soon as
+possible."
+
+Kitty promised to bear her trials with firmness, and Mr. Arbuton said,
+not very consequently, as she thought, "I had been planning to spend a
+few days in Quebec, myself, and I shall have the opportunity of
+inquiring about Mrs. Ellison's convalescence. In fact," he added,
+turning to the colonel, "I hope you'll let me be of service to you in
+getting to a hotel."
+
+And when the boat landed, Mr. Arbuton actually busied himself in finding
+a carriage and putting the various Ellison wraps and bags into it. Then
+he helped to support Mrs. Ellison ashore, and to lift her to the best
+place. He raised his hat, and had good-morning on his tongue, when the
+astonished colonel called out, "Why, the deuce! You're going to ride up
+with us!"
+
+Mr. Arbuton thought he had better get another carriage; he should
+incommode Mrs. Ellison; but Mrs. Ellison protested that he would not at
+all; and, to cut the matter short, he mounted to the colonel's side. It
+was another stroke of fate.
+
+At the hotel they found a line of people reaching half-way down the
+outer steps from the inside of the office.
+
+"Hallo! what's this?" asked the colonel of the last man in the queue.
+
+"O, it's a little procession to the hotel register! We've been three
+quarters of an hour in passing a given point," said the man, who was
+plainly a fellow-citizen.
+
+"And haven't got by yet," said the colonel, taking to the speaker. "Then
+the house is full?"
+
+"Well, no; they haven't begun to throw them out of the window."
+
+"His humor is degenerating, Dick," said Kitty; and "Hadn't you better go
+inside and inquire?" asked Mrs. Ellison. It was part of the Ellison
+travelling joke for her thus to prompt the colonel in his duty.
+
+"I'm glad you mentioned it, Fanny. I was just going to drive off in
+despair." The colonel vanished within doors, and after long delay came
+out flushed, but not with triumph. "On the express condition that I have
+ladies with me, one an invalid, I am promised a room on the fifth floor
+some time during the day. They tell me the other hotel is crammed and
+it's no use to go there."
+
+Mrs. Ellison was ready to weep, and for the first time since her
+accident she harbored some bitterness against Mr. Arbuton. They all sat
+silent, and the colonel on the sidewalk silently wiped his brow.
+
+Mr. Arbuton, in the poverty of his invention, wondered if there was not
+some lodging-house where they could find shelter.
+
+"Of course there is," cried Mrs. Ellison, beaming upon her hero, and
+calling Kitty's attention to his ingenuity by a pressure with her well
+foot. "Richard, we must look up a boarding-house."
+
+"Do you know of any good boarding-houses?" asked the colonel of the
+driver, mechanically.
+
+"Plenty," answered the man.
+
+"Well, drive us to twenty or thirty first-class ones," commanded the
+colonel; and the search began.
+
+The colonel first asked prices and looked at rooms, and if he pronounced
+any apartment unsuitable, Kitty was despatched by Mrs. Ellison to view
+it and refute him. As often as she confirmed him, Mrs. Ellison was sure
+that they were both too fastidious, and they never turned away from a
+door but they closed the gates of paradise upon that afflicted lady. She
+began to believe that they should find no place whatever, when at last
+they stopped before a portal so unboarding-house-like in all outward
+signs, that she maintained it was of no use to ring, and imparted so
+much of her distrust to the colonel that, after ringing, he prefaced his
+demand for rooms with an apology for supposing that there were rooms to
+let there. Then, after looking at them, he returned to the carriage and
+reported that the whole affair was perfect, and that he should look no
+farther. Mrs. Ellison replied that she never could trust his judgment,
+he was so careless. Kitty inspected the premises, and came back in a
+transport that alarmed the worst fears of Mrs. Ellison. She was sure
+that they had better look farther, she knew there were plenty of nicer
+places. Even if the rooms were nice and the situation pleasant, she was
+certain that there must be some drawbacks which they did not know of
+yet. Whereupon her husband lifted her from the carriage, and bore her,
+without reply or comment of any kind, into the house.
+
+Throughout the search Mr. Arbuton had been making up his mind that he
+would part with his friends as soon as they found lodgings, give the day
+to Quebec, and take the evening train for Gorham, thus escaping the
+annoyances of a crowded hotel, and ending at once an acquaintance which
+he ought never to have let go so far. As long as the Ellisons were
+without shelter, he felt that it was due to himself not to abandon them.
+But even now that they were happily housed, had he done all that
+nobility obliged? He stood irresolute beside the carriage.
+
+"Won't you come up and see where we live?" asked Kitty, hospitably.
+
+"I shall be very glad," said Mr. Arbuton.
+
+"My dear fellow," said the colonel, in the parlor, "I didn't engage a
+room for you. I supposed you'd rather take your chances at the hotel."
+
+"O, I'm going away to-night."
+
+"Why, that's a pity!"
+
+"Yes, I've no fancy for a cot-bed in the hotel parlor. But I don't quite
+like to leave you here, after bringing this calamity upon you."
+
+"O, don't mention that! I was the only one to blame. We shall get on
+splendidly here."
+
+Mr. Arbuton suffered a vague disappointment. At the bottom of his heart
+was a formless hope that he might in some way be necessary to the
+Ellisons in their adversity; or if not that, then that something might
+entangle him further and compel his stay. But they seemed quite equal in
+themselves to the situation; they were in far more comfortable quarters
+than they could have hoped for, and plainly should want for nothing;
+Fortune put on a smiling face, and bade him go free of them. He fancied
+it a mocking smile, though, as he stood an instant silently weighing one
+thing against another. The colonel was patiently waiting his motion;
+Mrs. Ellison sat watching him from the sofa; Kitty moved about the room
+with averted face,--a pretty domestic presence, a household priestess
+ordering the temporary Penates. Mr. Arbuton opened his lips to say
+farewell, but a god spoke through them,--inconsequently, as the gods for
+the most part do, saying, "Besides, I suppose you've got all the rooms
+here."
+
+"O, as to that I don't know," answered the colonel, not recognizing the
+language of inspiration, "let's ask." Kitty knocked a photograph-book
+off the table, and Mrs. Ellison said, "Why, Kitty!" But nothing more was
+spoken till the landlady came. She had another room, but doubted if it
+would answer. It was in the attic, and was a back room, though it had a
+pleasant outlook. Mr. Arbuton had no doubt that it would do very well
+for the day or two he was going to stay, and took it hastily, without
+going to look at it. He had his valise carried up at once, and then he
+went to the post-office to see if he had any letters, offering to ask
+also for Colonel Ellison.
+
+Kitty stole off to explore the chamber given her at the rear of the
+house; that is to say, she opened the window looking out on what their
+hostess told her was the garden of the Ursuline Convent, and stood there
+in a mute transport. A black cross rose in the midst, and all about this
+wandered the paths and alleys of the garden, through clumps of
+lilac-bushes and among the spires of hollyhocks. The grounds were
+enclosed by high walls in part, and in part by the group of the convent
+edifices, built of gray stone, high gabled, and topped by
+dormer-windowed steep roofs of tin, which, under the high morning sun,
+lay an expanse of keenest splendor, while many a grateful shadow dappled
+the full-foliaged garden below. Two slim, tall poplars stood against the
+gable of the chapel, and shot their tops above its roof, and under a
+porch near them two nuns sat motionless in the sun, black-robed, with
+black veils falling over their shoulders, and their white faces lost in
+the white linen that draped them from breast to crown. Their hands lay
+quiet in their laps, and they seemed unconscious of the other nuns
+walking in the garden-paths with little children, their pupils, and
+answering their laughter from time to time with voices as simple and
+innocent as their own. Kitty looked down upon them all with a swelling
+heart. They were but figures in a beautiful picture of something old and
+poetical; but she loved them, and pitied them, and was most happy in
+them, the same as if they had been real. It could not be that they and
+she were in the same world: she must be dreaming over a book in
+Charley's room at Eriecreek. She shaded her eyes for a better look, when
+the noonday gun boomed from the citadel; the bell upon the chapel
+jangled harshly, and those strange maskers, those quaint black birds
+with white breasts and faces, flocked indoors. At the same time a small
+dog under her window howled dolorously at the jangling of the bell; and
+Kitty, with an impartial joy, turned from the pensive romance of the
+convent garden to the mild comedy of the scene to which his woeful note
+attracted her. When he had uttered his anguish, he relapsed into the
+quietest small French dog that ever was, and lay down near a large,
+tranquil cat, whom neither the bell nor he had been able to stir from
+her slumbers in the sun; a peasant-like old man kept on sawing wood, and
+a little child stood still amidst the larkspurs and marigolds of a tiny
+garden, while over the flower-pots on the low window-sill of the
+neighboring house to which it belonged, a young, motherly face gazed
+peacefully out. The great extent of the convent grounds had left this
+poor garden scarce breathing-space for its humble blooms; with the low
+paling fence that separated it from the adjoining house-yards it looked
+like a toy-garden or the background of a puppet-show, and in its way it
+was as quaintly unreal to the young girl as the nunnery itself.
+
+When she saw it first, the city's walls and other warlike ostentations
+had taken her imagination with the historic grandeur of Quebec; but the
+fascination deepened now that she was admitted, as it were, to the
+religious heart and the domestic privacy of the famous old town. She was
+romantic, as most good young girls are; and she had the same pleasure in
+the strangeness of the things about her as she would have felt in the
+keeping of a charming story. To Fanny's "Well, Kitty, I suppose all this
+just suits you," when she had returned to the little parlor where the
+sufferer lay, she answered with a sigh of irrepressible content, "O yes!
+could anything be more beautiful?" and her enraptured eye dwelt upon the
+low ceilings, the deep, wide chimneys eloquent of the mighty fires with
+which they must roar in winter, the French windows with their curious
+and clumsy fastenings, and every little detail that made the place alien
+and precious.
+
+Fanny broke into a laugh at the visionary absence in her face.
+
+"Do you think the place is good enough for your hero and heroine?" asked
+she, slyly; for Kitty had one of those family reputes, so hard to
+survive, for childish attempts of her own in the world of fiction where
+so great part of her life had been passed; and Mrs. Ellison, who was as
+unliterary a soul as ever breathed, admired her with the heartiness
+which unimaginative people often feel for their idealizing friends, and
+believed that she was always deep in the mysteries of some plot.
+
+"O, I don't know," Kitty answered with a little color, "about heroes and
+heroines; but, I'd like to live here, myself. Yes," she continued,
+rather to herself than to her listener, "I do believe this is what I was
+made for. I've always wanted to live amongst old things, in a stone
+house with dormer-windows. Why, there isn't a single dormer-window in
+Eriecreek, nor even a brick house, let alone a stone one. O yes, indeed!
+I was meant for an old country."
+
+"Well, then, Kitty, I don't see what you're to do but to marry East and
+live East; or else find a rich husband, and get him to take you to
+Europe to live."
+
+"Yes; or get him to come and live in Quebec. That's all I'd ask, and he
+needn't be a very rich man, for that."
+
+"Why, you poor child, what sort of husband could you get to settle down
+in _this_ dead old place?"
+
+"O, I suppose some kind of artist or literary man."
+
+This was not Mrs. Ellison's notion of the kind of husband who was to
+realize for Kitty her fancy for life in an old country; but she was
+content to let the matter rest for the present, and, in a serene
+thankfulness to the power that had brought two marriageable young
+creatures together beneath the same roof, and under her own observance,
+she composed herself among the sofa-cushions, from which she meant to
+conduct the campaign against Mr. Arbuton with relentless vigor.
+
+"Well," she said, "it won't be fair if you are not happy in this world,
+Kitty, you ask so little of it"; while Kitty turned to the window
+overlooking the street, and lost herself in the drama of the passing
+figures below. They were new, and yet oddly familiar, for she had long
+known them in the realm of romance. The peasant-women who went by, in
+hats of felt or straw, some on foot with baskets, and some in their
+light market-carts, were all, in their wrinkled and crooked age or their
+fresh-faced, strong-limbed youth, her friends since childhood in many a
+tale of France or Germany; and the black-robed priests, who mixed with
+the passers on the narrow wooden sidewalk, and now and then courteously
+gave way, or lifted their wide-rimmed hats in a grave, smiling
+salutation, were more recent acquaintances, but not less intimate. They
+were out of old romances about Italy and Spain, in which she was very
+learned; and this butcher's boy, tilting along through the crowd with a
+half-staggering run, was from any one of Dickens's stories, and she
+divined that the four-armed wooden trough on his shoulder was the
+butcher's tray, which figures in every novelist's description of a
+London street-crowd. There were many other types, as French mothers of
+families with market-baskets on their arms; very pretty French
+school-girls with books under their arms; wild-looking country boys with
+red raspberries in birch-bark measures; and quiet gliding nuns with
+white hoods and downcast faces: each of whom she unerringly relegated to
+an appropriate corner of her world of unreality. A young, mild-faced,
+spectacled Anglican curate she did not give a moment's pause, but rushed
+him instantly through the whole series of Anthony Trollope's novels,
+which dull books, I am sorry to say, she had read, and liked, every one;
+and then she began to find various people astray out of Thackeray. The
+trig corporal, with the little visorless cap worn so jauntily, the light
+stick carried in one hand, and the broad-sealed official document in the
+other, had also, in his breast-pocket, one of those brief, infrequent
+missives which Lieutenant Osborne used to send to poor Amelia; a tall,
+awkward officer did duty for Major Dobbin; and when a very pretty lady
+driving a pony carriage, with a footman in livery on the little perch
+behind her, drew rein beside the pavement, and a handsome young captain
+in a splendid uniform saluted her and began talking with her in a
+languid, affected way, it was Osborne recreant to the thought of his
+betrothed, one of whose tender letters he kept twirling in his fingers
+while he talked.
+
+Most of the people whom she saw passing had letters or papers, and, in
+fact, they were coming from the post-office, where the noonday mails had
+just been opened. So she went on turning substance into shadow,--unless,
+indeed, flesh and blood is the illusion,--and, as I am bound to own,
+catching at very slight pretexts in many cases for the exercise of her
+sorcery, when her eye fell upon a gentleman at a little distance. At the
+same moment he raised his eyes from a letter at which he had been
+glancing, and ran them along the row of houses opposite, till they
+rested on the window at which she stood. Then he smiled and lifted his
+hat, and, with a start, she recognized Mr. Arbuton, while a certain
+chill struck to her heart through the tumult she felt there. Till he saw
+her there had been such a cold reserve and hauteur in his bearing, that
+the trepidation which she had felt about him at times, the day before,
+and which had worn quite away under the events of the morning, was
+renewed again, and the aspect, in which he had been so strange that she
+did not know him, seemed the only one that he had ever worn. This effect
+lasted till Mr. Arbuton could find his way to her, and place in her
+eager hand a letter from the girls and Dr. Ellison. She forgot it then,
+and vanished till she read her letter.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+MR. ARBUTON MAKES HIMSELF AGREEABLE.
+
+
+The first care of Colonel Ellison had been to call a doctor, and to know
+the worst about the sprained ankle, upon which his plans had fallen
+lame; and the worst was that it was not a bad sprain, but Mrs. Ellison,
+having been careless of it the day before, had aggravated the hurt, and
+she must now have that perfect rest, which physicians prescribe so
+recklessly of other interests and duties, for a week at least, and
+possibly two or three.
+
+The colonel was still too much a soldier to be impatient at the doctor's
+order, but he was of far too active a temper to be quiet under it. He
+therefore proposed to himself nothing less than the capture of Quebec in
+an historical sense, and even before dinner he began to prepare for the
+campaign. He sallied forth, and descended upon the bookstores wherever
+he found them lurking, in whatsoever recess of the Upper or Lower Town,
+and returned home laden with guide-books to Quebec, and monographs upon
+episodes of local history, such as are produced in great quantity by the
+semi-clerical literary taste of out-of-the-way Catholic capitals. The
+colonel (who had gone actively into business, after leaving the army, at
+the close of the war) had always a newspaper somewhere about him, but he
+was not a reader of many books. Of the volumes in the doctor's library,
+he had never in former days willingly opened any but the plays of
+Shakespeare, and Don Quixote, long passages of which he knew by heart.
+He had sometimes attempted other books, but for the most of Kitty's
+favorite authors he professed as frank a contempt as for the
+Mound-Builders themselves. He had read one book of travel, namely, The
+Innocents Abroad, which he held to be so good a book that he need never
+read anything else about the countries of which it treated. When he
+brought in this extraordinary collection of pamphlets, both Kitty and
+Fanny knew what to expect; for the colonel was as ready to receive
+literature at second-hand as to avoid its original sources. He had in
+this way picked up a great deal of useful knowledge, and he was famous
+for clipping from newspapers scraps of instructive fact, all of which he
+relentlessly remembered. He had already a fair outline of the local
+history in his mind, and this had been deepened and freshened by Dr.
+Ellison's recent talk of his historical studies. Moreover, he had
+secured in the course of the present journey, from his wife's and
+cousin's reading of divers guide-books, a new store of names and dates,
+which he desired to attach to the proper localities with their help.
+
+"Light reading for leisure hours, Fanny," said Kitty, looking askance at
+the colonel's literature as she sat down near her cousin after dinner.
+
+"Yes; and you start fair, ladies. Start with Jacques Cartier, ancient
+mariner of Dieppe, in the year 1535. No favoritism in this
+investigation; no bringing forward of Champlain or Montcalm prematurely;
+no running off on subsequent conquests or other side-issues. Stick to
+the discovery, and the names of Jacques Cartier and Donnacona. Come, do
+something for an honest living."
+
+"Who was Donnacona?" demanded Mrs. Ellison, with indifference.
+
+"That is just what these fascinating little volumes will tell us. Kitty,
+read something to your suffering cousins about Donnacona,--he sounds
+uncommonly like an Irishman," answered the colonel, establishing himself
+in an easy-chair; and Kitty picked up a small sketch of the history of
+Quebec, and, opening it, fell into the trance which came upon her at the
+touch of a book, and read on for some pages to herself.
+
+"Well, upon my word," said the colonel, "I might as well be reading
+about Donnacona myself, for any comfort I get."
+
+"O Dick, I forgot. I was just looking. Now I'm really going to
+commence."
+
+"No, not yet," cried Mrs. Ellison, rising on her elbow. "Where is Mr.
+Arbuton?"
+
+"What has he to do with Donnacona, my dear?"
+
+"Everything. You know he's stayed on our account, and I never heard of
+anything so impolite, so inhospitable, as offering to read without him.
+Go and call him, Richard, do."
+
+"O, no," pleaded Kitty, "he won't care about it. Don't call him, Dick."
+
+"Why, Kitty, I'm surprised at you! When you read so beautifully! Yon
+needn't be ashamed, I'm sure."
+
+"I'm not ashamed; but, at the same time, I don't want to read to him."
+
+"Well, call him any way, colonel. He's in his room."
+
+"If you do," said Kitty, with superfluous dignity, "I must go away."
+
+"Very well, Kitty, just as you please. Only I want Richard to witness
+that I'm not to blame if Mr. Arbuton thinks us unfeeling or neglectful."
+
+"O, if he doesn't say what he thinks, it'll make no difference."
+
+"It seems to me that this is a good deal of fuss to make about one human
+being, a mere passing man and brother of a day, isn't it?" said the
+colonel. "Go on with Donnacona, do."
+
+There came a knock at the door. Kitty leaped nervously to her feet, and
+fled out of the room. But it was only the little French serving-maid
+upon some errand which she quickly despatched.
+
+"Well, _now_ what do you think?" asked Mrs. Ellison.
+
+"Why, I think you've a surprising knowledge of French for one who
+studied it at school. Do you suppose she understood you?"
+
+"O, nonsense! You know I mean Kitty and her very queer behavior.
+Richard, if you moon at me in that stupid way," she continued, "I shall
+certainly end in an insane asylum. Can't you see what's under your very
+nose?"
+
+"Yes, I can, Fanny," answered the colonel, "if anything's there. But I
+give you my word, I don't know any more than millions yet unborn what
+you're driving at." The colonel took up the book which Kitty had thrown
+down, and went to his room to try to read up Donnacona for himself,
+while his wife penitently turned to a pamphlet in French, which he had
+bought with the others. "After all," she thought, "men will be men"; and
+seemed not to find the fact wholly wanting in consolation.
+
+A few minutes after there was a murmur of voices in the entry without,
+at a window looking upon the convent garden, where it happened to Mr.
+Arbuton, descending from his attic chamber, to find Kitty standing, a
+pretty shape against the reflected light of the convent roofs, and
+amidst a little greenery of house-plants, tall geraniums, an overarching
+ivy, some delicate roses. She had paused there, on her way from Fanny's
+to her own room, and was looking into the garden, where a pair of silent
+nuns were pacing up and down the paths, turning now their backs with the
+heavy sable coiffure sweeping their black robes, and now their still,
+mask-like faces, set in that stiff framework of white linen. Sometimes
+they came so near that she could distinguish their features, and imagine
+an expression that she should know if she saw them again; and while she
+stood self-forgetfully feigning a character for each of them, Mr.
+Arbuton spoke to her and took his place at her side.
+
+"We're remarkably favored in having this bit of opera under our windows,
+Miss Ellison," he said, and smiled as Kitty answered, "O, is it really
+like an opera? I never saw one, but I could imagine it must be
+beautiful," and they both looked on in silence a moment, while the nuns
+moved, shadow-like, out of the garden, and left it empty.
+
+Then Mr. Arbuton said something to which Kitty answered simply, "I'll
+see if my cousin doesn't want me," and presently stood beside Mrs.
+Ellison's sofa, a little conscious in color. "Fanny, Mr. Arbuton has
+asked me to go and see the cathedral with him. Do you think it would be
+right?"
+
+Mrs. Ellison's triumphant heart rose to her lips. "Why, you dear,
+particular, innocent little goose," she cried, flinging her arms about
+Kitty, and kissing her till the young girl blushed again; "of course it
+would! Go! You mustn't stay mewed up in here. _I_ sha'n't be able to go
+about with you; and if I can judge by the colonel's _breathing_, as he
+calls it, from the room in there, _he_ won't, at present. But the idea
+of _your_ having a question of propriety!" And indeed it was the first
+time Kitty had ever had such a thing, and the remembrance of it put a
+kind of constraint upon her, as she strolled demurely beside Mr. Arbuton
+towards the cathedral.
+
+"You must be guide," said he, "for this is my first day in Quebec, you
+know, and you are an old inhabitant in comparison."
+
+"I'll show the way," she answered, "if you'll interpret the sights. I
+think I must be stranger to them than you, in spite of my long
+residence. Sometimes I'm afraid that I _do_ only fancy I enjoy these
+things, as Mrs. March said, for I've no European experiences to contrast
+them with. I know that it _seems_ very delightful, though, and quite
+like what I should expect in Europe."
+
+"You'd expect very little of Europe, then, in most things; though
+there's no disputing that it's a very pretty illusion of the Old World."
+
+A few steps had brought them into the market-square in front of the
+cathedral, where a little belated traffic still lingered in the few old
+peasant-women hovering over baskets of such fruits and vegetables as had
+long been out of season in the States, and the housekeepers and
+serving-maids cheapening these wares. A sentry moved mechanically up and
+down before the high portal of the Jesuit Barracks, over the arch of
+which were still the letters I. H. S. carved long ago upon the keystone;
+and the ancient edifice itself, with its yellow stucco front and its
+grated windows, had every right to be a monastery turned barracks in
+France or Italy. A row of quaint stone houses--inns and shops--formed
+the upper side of the Square; while the modern buildings of the Rue
+Fabrique on the lower side might serve very well for that show of
+improvement which deepens the sentiment of the neighboring antiquity and
+decay in Latin towns. As for the cathedral, which faced the convent from
+across the Square, it was as cold and torpid a bit of Renaissance as
+could be found in Rome itself. A red-coated soldier or two passed
+through the Square; three or four neat little French policemen lounged
+about in blue uniforms and flaring havelocks; some walnut-faced,
+blue-eyed old citizens and peasants sat upon the thresholds of the row
+of old houses, and gazed dreamily through the smoke of their pipes at
+the slight stir and glitter of shopping about the fine stores of the Rue
+Fabrique. An air of serene disoccupation pervaded the place, with which
+the occasional riot of the drivers of the long row of calashes and
+carriages in front of the cathedral did not discord. Whenever a stray
+American wandered into the Square, there was a wild flight of these
+drivers towards him, and his person was lost to sight amidst their
+pantomime. They did not try to underbid each other, and they were
+perfectly good-humored; as soon as he had made his choice, the rejected
+multitude returned to their places on the curbstone, pursuing the
+successful aspirant with inscrutable jokes as he drove off, while the
+horses went on munching the contents of their leathern head-bags, and
+tossing them into the air to shake down the lurking grains of corn.
+
+"It _is_ like Europe; your friends were right," said Mr. Arbuton as they
+escaped into the cathedral from one of these friendly onsets. "It's
+quite the atmosphere of foreign travel, and you ought to be able to
+realize the feelings of a tourist."
+
+A priest was saying mass at one of the side-altars, assisted by acolytes
+in their every-day clothes; and outside of the railing a market-woman,
+with a basket of choke-cherries, knelt among a few other poor people.
+Presently a young English couple came in, he with a dashing India scarf
+about his hat, and she very stylishly dressed, who also made their
+genuflections with the rest, and then sat down and dropped their heads
+in prayer.
+
+"This is like enough Europe, too," murmured Mr. Arbuton. "It's very good
+North Italy; or South, for the matter of that."
+
+"O, is it?" answered Kitty, joyously. "I thought it must be!" And she
+added, in that trustful way of hers: "It's all very familiar; but then
+it seems to me on this journey that I've seen a great many things that I
+know I've only read of before"; and so followed Mr. Arbuton in his tour
+of the pictures.
+
+She was as ignorant of art as any Roman or Florentine girl whose life
+has been passed in the midst of it; and she believed these mighty fine
+pictures, and was puzzled by Mr. Arbuton's behavior towards them, who
+was too little imaginative or too conscientious to make merit for them
+out of the things they suggested. He treated the poor altar-pieces of
+the Quebec cathedral with the same harsh indifference he would have
+shown to the second-rate paintings of a European gallery; doubted the
+Vandyck, and cared nothing for the Conception, "in the style of Le
+Brun," over the high-altar, though it had the historical interest of
+having survived that bombardment of 1759 which destroyed the church.
+
+Kitty innocently singled out the worst picture in the place as her
+favorite, and then was piqued, and presently frightened, at his cold
+reluctance about it. He made her feel that it was very bad, and that she
+shared its inferiority, though he said nothing to that effect. She
+learned the shame of not being a connoisseur in a connoisseur's company,
+and she perceived more painfully than ever before that a Bostonian, who
+had been much in Europe, might be very uncomfortable to the simple,
+unravelled American. Yet, she reminded herself, the Marches had been in
+Europe, and they were Bostonians also; and they did not go about putting
+everything under foot; they seemed to care for everything they saw, and
+to have a friendly jest, if not praises, for it. She liked that; she
+would have been well enough pleased to have Mr. Arbuton laugh outright
+at her picture, and she could have joined him in it. But the look,
+however flattered into an air of polite question at last, which he had
+bent upon her, seemed to outlaw her and condemn her taste in everything.
+As they passed out of the cathedral, she would rather have gone home
+than continued the walk as he begged her, if she were not tired, to do;
+but this would have been flight, and she was not a coward. So they
+sauntered down the Rue Fabrique, and turned into Palace Street. As they
+went by the door of Hotel Musty, her pleasant friends came again into
+her mind, and she said, "This is where we stayed last week, with Mr. and
+Mrs. March."
+
+"Those Boston people?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you know where they live in Boston?"
+
+"Why, we have their address; but I can't think of it. I believe
+somewhere in the southern part of the city--"
+
+"The South End?"
+
+"O yes, that's it. Have you ever heard of them?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I thought perhaps you might have known Mr. March. He's in the insurance
+business--"
+
+"O no! No, I don't know him," said Mr. Arbuton, eagerly. Kitty wondered
+if there could be anything wrong with the business repute of Mr. March,
+but dismissed the thought as unworthy; and having perceived that her
+friends were snubbed, she said bravely, that they were the most
+delightful people she had ever seen, and she was sorry that they were
+not still in Quebec. He shared her regret tacitly, if at all, and they
+walked in silence to the gate, whence they strolled down the winding
+street outside the wall into the Lower Town. But it was not a pleasant
+ramble for Kitty: she was in a dim dread of hitherto unseen and
+unimagined trespasses against good taste, not only in pictures and
+people, but in all life, which, from having been a very smiling prospect
+when she set out with Mr. Arbuton, had suddenly become a narrow pathway,
+in which one must pick one's way with more regard to each step than any
+general end. All this was as obscure and uncertain as the intimations
+which had produced it, and which, in words, had really amounted to
+nothing. But she felt more and more that in her companion there was
+something wholly alien to the influences which had shaped her; and
+though she could not know how much, she was sure of enough to make her
+dreary in his presence.
+
+They wandered through the quaintness and noiseless bustle of the Lower
+Town thoroughfares, and came by and by to that old church, the oldest in
+Quebec, which was built near two hundred years ago, in fulfilment of a
+vow made at the repulse of Sir William Phipps's attack upon the city,
+and further famed for the prophecy of a nun, that this church should be
+ruined by the fire in which a successful attempt of the English was yet
+to involve the Lower Town. A painting, which represented the vision of
+the nun, perished in the conflagration which verified it, in 1759; but
+the walls of the ancient structure remain to witness this singular piece
+of history, which Kitty now glanced at furtively in one of the colonel's
+guide-books; since her ill-fortune with the picture in the cathedral,
+she had not openly cared for anything.
+
+At one side of the church there was a booth for the sale of crockery and
+tin ware; and there was an every-day cheerfulness of small business in
+the shops and tented stands about the square on which the church faced,
+and through which there was continual passing of heavy burdens from the
+port, swift calashes, and slow, country-paced market-carts.
+
+Mr. Arbuton made no motion to enter the church, and Kitty would not hint
+the curiosity she felt to see the interior; and while they lingered a
+moment, the door opened, and a peasant came out with a little coffin in
+his arms. His eyes were dim and his face wet with weeping, and he bore
+the little coffin tenderly, as if his caress might reach the dead child
+within. Behind him she came who must be the mother, her face deeply
+hidden in her veil. Beside the pavement waited a shabby calash, with a
+driver half asleep on his perch; and the man, still clasping his
+precious burden, clambered into the vehicle, and laid it upon his knees,
+while the woman groped, through her tears and veil, for the step. Kitty
+and her companion had moved reverently aside; but now Mr. Arbuton came
+forward, and helped the woman to her place. She gave him a hoarse, sad
+"_Merci!_" and spread a fold of her shawl fondly over the end of the
+little coffin; the drowsy driver whipped up his beast, and the calash
+jolted away.
+
+Kitty cast a grateful glance upon Mr. Arbuton, as they now entered the
+church, by a common impulse. On their way towards the high-altar they
+passed the rude black bier, with the tallow candles yet smoking in their
+black wooden candlesticks. A few worshippers were dropped here and there
+in the vacant seats, and at a principal side-altar knelt a poor woman
+praying before a wooden effigy of the dead Christ that lay in a glass
+case under the altar. The image was of life-size, and was painted to
+represent life, or rather death, with false hair and beard, and with the
+muslin drapery managed to expose the stigmata: it was stretched upon a
+bed strewn with artificial flowers; and it was dreadful. But the poor
+soul at her devotions there prayed to it in an ecstasy of supplication,
+flinging her arms asunder with imploring gesture, clasping her hands and
+bowing her head upon them, while her person swayed from side to side in
+the abandon of her prayer. Who could she be, and what was her mighty
+need of blessing or forgiveness? As her wont was, Kitty threw her own
+soul into the imagined case of the suppliant, the tragedy of her desire
+or sorrow. Yet, like all who suffer sympathetically, she was not without
+consolations unknown to the principal; and the waning afternoon, as it
+lit up the conventional ugliness of the old church, and the
+paraphernalia of its worship, relieved her emotional self-abandon with a
+remote sense of content, so that it may have been a jealousy for the
+integrity of her own revery, as well as a feeling for the poor woman,
+that made her tremble lest Mr. Arbuton should in some way disparage the
+spectacle. I suppose that her interest in it was more an aesthetic than
+a spiritual one; it embodied to her sight many a scene of penitence that
+had played before her fancy, and I do not know but she would have been
+willing to have the suppliant guilty of some dreadful misdeed, rather
+than eating meat last Friday, which was probably her sin. However it
+was, the ancient crone before that ghastly idol was precious to her, and
+it seemed too great a favor, when at last the suppliant wiped her eyes,
+rose trembling from her knees, and approaching Kitty, stretched towards
+her a shaking palm for charity.
+
+It was a touch that transfigured all, and gave even Mr. Arbuton's
+neutrality a light of ideal character. He bestowed the alms craved of
+him in turn, he did not repulse the beldame's blessing; and Kitty, who
+was already moved by his kindness to that poor mourner at the door,
+forgot that the earlier part of their walk had been so miserable, and
+climbed back to the Upper Town through the Prescott Gate in greater
+gayety than she had yet known that day in his company. I think he had
+not done much to make her cheerful; but it is one of the advantages of a
+temperament like his, that very little is expected of it, and that it
+can more easily than any other make the human heart glad; at the least
+softening in it, the soul frolics with a craven lightsomeness. For this
+reason Kitty was able to enjoy with novel satisfaction the
+picturesqueness of Mountain Street, and they both admired the huge
+shoulder of rock near the gate, with its poplars atop, and the battery
+at the brink, with the muzzles of the guns thrust forward against the
+sky. She could not move him to her pleasure in the grotesqueness of the
+circus-bills plastered half-way up the rock; but he tolerated the levity
+with which she commented on them, and her light sallies upon passing
+things, and he said nothing to prevent her reaching home in serene
+satisfaction.
+
+"Well, Kitty," said the tenant of the sofa, as Kitty and the colonel
+drew up to the table on which the tea was laid at the sofa-side, "you've
+had a nice walk, haven't you?"
+
+"O yes, very nice. That is, the first part of it wasn't very nice; but
+after a while we reached an old church in the Lower Town,--which was
+very interesting,--and then we appeared to cheer up and take a new
+start."
+
+"Well," asked the colonel, "what did you find so interesting at that old
+church?"
+
+"Why, there was a baby's funeral; and an old woman, perfectly crushed by
+some trouble or other, praying before an altar, and--"
+
+"It seems to take very little to cheer you up," said the colonel. "All
+you ask of your fellow-beings is a heart-breaking bereavement and a
+religious agony, and you are lively at once. _Some_ people might require
+human sacrifices, but you don't."
+
+Kitty looked at her cousin a moment with vague amaze. The grossness of
+the absurdity flashed upon her, and she felt as if another touch must
+bring the tears. She said nothing; but Mrs. Ellison, who saw only that
+she was cut off from her heart's desire of gossip, came to the rescue.
+
+"Don't answer a word, Kitty, not a single word; I never heard anything
+more insulting from one cousin to another; and I should say it, if I was
+brought into a court of justice."
+
+A sudden burst of laughter from Kitty, who hid her conscious face in her
+hands, interrupted Mrs. Ellison's defence.
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Ellison, piqued at her desertion, "I hope you
+understand yourselves. _I_ don't." This was Mrs. Ellison's attitude
+towards her husband's whole family, who on their part never had been
+able to account for the colonel's choice except as a joke, and sometimes
+questioned if he had not perhaps carried the joke too far; though they
+loved her too, for a kind of passionate generosity and sublime,
+inconsequent unselfishness about her.
+
+"What I want to know, _now_," said the colonel, as soon as Kitty would
+let him, "and I'll try to put it as politely as I can, is simply this:
+what made the first part of your walk so disagreeable? You didn't see a
+wedding-party, or a child rescued from a horrible death, or a man saved
+from drowning, or anything of that kind, did you?"
+
+But the colonel would have done better not to say anything. His wife was
+made peevish by his persistence, and the loss of the harmless pleasure
+upon which she had counted in the history of Kitty's walk with Mr.
+Arbuton. Kitty herself would not laugh again; in fact she grew serious
+and thoughtful, and presently took up a book, and after that went to her
+own room, where she stood awhile at her window, and looked out on the
+garden of the Ursulines. The moon hung full orb in the stainless heaven,
+and deepened the mystery of the paths and trees, and lit the silvery
+roofs and chimneys of the convent with tender effulgence. A wandering
+odor of leaf and flower stole up from the garden, but she perceived the
+sweetness, like the splendor, with veiled senses. She was turning over
+in her thought the incidents of her walk, and trying to make out if
+anything had really happened, first to provoke her against Mr. Arbuton,
+and then to reconcile her to him. Had he said or done anything about her
+favorite painting (which she hated now), or the Marches, to offend her?
+Or if it had been his tone and manner, was his after-conduct at the old
+church sufficient penance? What was it he had done that common humanity
+did not require? Was he so very superior to common humanity, that she
+should meekly rejoice at his kindness to the afflicted mother? Why need
+she have cared for his forbearance toward the rapt devotee? She became
+aware that she was ridiculous. "Dick was right," she confessed, "and I
+will _not_ let myself be made a goose of"; and when the bugle at the
+citadel called the soldiers to rest, and the harsh chapel-bell bade the
+nuns go dream of heaven, she also fell asleep, a smile on her lips and a
+light heart in her breast.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+A LETTER OF KITTY'S.
+
+
+    Quebec, August --, 1870.
+
+    Dear Girls: Since the letter I wrote you a day or two after we got
+    here, we have been going on very much as you might have expected. A
+    whole week has passed, but we still bear our enforced leisure with
+    fortitude; and, though Boston and New York are both fading into the
+    improbable (as far as we are concerned), Quebec continues
+    inexhaustible, and I don't begrudge a moment of the time we are
+    giving it.
+
+    Fanny still keeps her sofa; the first enthusiasm of her affliction
+    has worn away, and she has nothing to sustain her now but planning
+    our expeditions about the city. She has got the map and the history
+    of Quebec by heart, and she holds us to the literal fulfilment of her
+    instructions. On this account, she often has to send Dick and me out
+    together when she would like to keep him with her, for she won't
+    trust either of us alone, and when we come back she examines us
+    separately to see whether we have skipped anything. This makes us
+    faithful in the smallest things. She says she is determined that
+    Uncle Jack shall have a full and circumstantial report from me of all
+    that he wants to know about the celebrated places here, and I really
+    think he will, if I go on, or am goaded on, in this way. It's pure
+    devotion to the cause in Fanny, for you know she doesn't care for
+    such things herself, and has no pleasure in it but carrying a point.
+    Her chief consolation under her trial of keeping still is to see how
+    I look in her different dresses. She sighs over me as I appear in a
+    new garment, and says, O, if she only had the dressing of me! Then
+    she gets up and limps and hops across the room to where I stand
+    before the glass, and puts a pin here and a ribbon there, and gives
+    my hair (which she has dressed herself) a little dab, to make it lie
+    differently, and then scrambles back to her sofa, and knocks her lame
+    ankle against something, and lies there groaning and enjoying herself
+    like a martyr. On days when she thinks she is never going to get
+    well, she says she doesn't know why she doesn't give me her things at
+    once and be done with it; and on days when she thinks she is going to
+    get well right away, she says she will have me one made something
+    like whatever dress I have got on, as soon as she's home. Then up
+    she'll jump again for the exact measure, and tell me the history of
+    every stitch, and how she'll have it altered just the least grain,
+    and differently trimmed to suit my complexion better; and ends by
+    having promised to get me something not in the least like it. You
+    have some idea already of what Fanny is; and all you have got to do
+    is to multiply it by about fifty thousand. Her sprained ankle simply
+    intensifies her whole character.
+
+    Besides helping to compose Fanny's expeditionary corps, and really
+    exerting himself in the cause of Uncle Jack, as he calls it, Dick is
+    behaving beautifully. Every morning, after breakfast, he goes over to
+    the hotel, and looks at the arrivals and reads the newspapers, and
+    though we never get anything out of him afterwards, we somehow feel
+    informed of all that is going on. He has taken to smoking a clay pipe
+    in honor of the Canadian fashion, and he wears a gay, barbaric scarf
+    of Indian muslin wound round his hat and flying out behind; because
+    the Quebeckers protect themselves in that way against sunstroke when
+    the thermometer gets up among the sixties. He has also bought a pair
+    of snow-shoes to be prepared for the other extreme of weather, in
+    case anything else should happen to Fanny, and detain us into the
+    winter. When he has rested from his walk to the hotel, we usually go
+    out together and explore, as we do also in the afternoon; and in the
+    evening we walk on Durham Terrace,--a promenade overlooking the
+    river, where the whole cramped and crooked city goes for exercise.
+    It's a formal parade in the evening; but one morning I went there
+    before breakfast, for a change, and found it the resort of careless
+    ease; two or three idle boys were sunning themselves on the carriages
+    of the big guns that stand on the Terrace, a little dog was barking
+    at the chimneys of the Lower Town, and an old gentleman was walking
+    up and down in his dressing-gown and slippers, just as if it were
+    his own front porch. He looked something like Uncle Jack, and I
+    wished it had been he,--to see the smoke curling softly up from the
+    Lower Town, the bustle about the market-place, and the shipping in
+    the river, and the haze hanging over the water a little way off, and
+    the near hills all silver, and the distant ones blue.
+
+    But if we are coming to the grand and the beautiful, why, there is no
+    direction in which you can look about Quebec without seeing it; and
+    it is always mixed up with something so familiar and homelike, that
+    my heart warms to it. The Jesuit Barracks are just across the street
+    from us in the foreground of the most magnificent landscape; the
+    building is--think, you Eriecreekers of an hour!--two hundred years
+    old, and it looks five hundred. The English took it away from the
+    Jesuits in 1760, and have used it as barracks ever since; but it
+    isn't in the least changed, so that a Jesuit missionary who visited
+    it the other day said that it was as if his brother priests had been
+    driven out of it the week before. Well, you might think so old and so
+    historical a place would be putting on airs, but it takes as kindly
+    to domestic life as a new frame-house, and I am never tired of
+    looking over into the yard at the frowsy soldiers' wives hanging
+    out clothes, and the unkempt children playing among the burdocks, and
+    chickens and cats, and the soldiers themselves carrying about the
+    officers' boots, or sawing wood and picking up chips to boil the
+    teakettle. They are off dignity as well as off duty, then; but when
+    they are on both, and in full dress, they make our volunteers (as I
+    remember them) seem very shabby and slovenly.
+
+    Over the belfry of the Barracks, our windows command a view of half
+    Quebec, with its roofs and spires dropping down the slope to the
+    Lower Town, where the masts of the ships in the river come tapering
+    up among them, and then of the plain stretching from the river in the
+    valley to a range of mountains against the horizon, with far-off
+    white villages glimmering out of their purple folds. The whole plain
+    is bright with houses and harvest-fields; and the distinctly divided
+    farms--the owners cut them up every generation, and give each son a
+    strip of the entire length--run back on either hand, from the
+    straight roads bordered by poplars, while the highways near the city
+    pass between lovely villas.
+
+    But this landscape and the Jesuit Barracks, with all their merits,
+    are nothing to the Ursuline Convent, just under our back windows,
+    which I told you something about in my other letter. We have been
+    reading up its history since, and we know about Madame de la Peltrie,
+    the noble Norman lady who founded it in 1640. She was very rich and
+    very beautiful, and a saint from the beginning, so that when her
+    husband died, and her poor old father wanted her to marry again and
+    not go into a nunnery, she didn't mind cheating him by a sham
+    marriage with a devout gentleman; and she came to Canada as soon as
+    her father was dead, with another saint, Marie de l'Incarnation, and
+    founded this convent. The first building is standing yet, as strong
+    as ever, though everything but the stone walls was burnt two
+    centuries ago. Only a few years since an old ash-tree, under which
+    the Ursulines first taught the Indian children, blew down, and now a
+    large black cross marks its place. The modern nuns are in the garden
+    nearly the whole morning long, and by night the ghosts of the former
+    nuns haunt it; and in very bright moonlight I myself do a bit of
+    Madame de la Peltrie there, and teach little Indian boys, who dwindle
+    like those in the song, as the moon goes down. It is an enchanted
+    place, and I wish we had it in the back yard at Eriecreek, though I
+    don't think the neighbors would approve of the architecture. I have
+    adopted two nuns for my own: one is tall and slender and pallid, and
+    you can see at a glance that she broke the heart of a mortal lover,
+    and knew it, when she became the bride of heaven; and the other is
+    short and plain and plump, and looks as comfortable and commonplace
+    as life-after-dinner. When the world is bright I revel in the
+    statue-like sadness of the beautiful nun, who never laughs or plays
+    with the little girl pupils; but when the world is dark--as the best
+    of worlds will be at times for a minute or two--I take to the fat
+    nun, and go in for a clumsy romp with the children; and then I fancy
+    that I am wiser if not better than the fair slim Ursuline. But
+    whichever I am, for the time being, I am vexed with the other; yet
+    they always are together, as if they were counterparts. I think a
+    nice story might be written about them.
+
+    In Wolfe's siege of Quebec this Ursuline Garden of ours was
+    everywhere torn up by the falling bombs, and the sisters were driven
+    out into the world they had forsaken forever, as Fanny has been
+    reading in a little French account of the events, written at the
+    time, by a nun of the General Hospital. It was there the Ursulines
+    took what refuge there was; going from their cloistered school-rooms
+    and their innocent little ones to the wards of the hospital, filled
+    with the wounded and dying of either side, and echoing with their
+    dreadful groans. What a sad, evil, bewildering world they had a
+    glimpse of! In the garden here, our poor Montcalm--I belong to the
+    French side, please, in Quebec--was buried in a grave dug for him by
+    a bursting shell. They have his skull now in the chaplain's room of
+    the convent, where we saw it the other day. They have made it
+    comfortable in a glass box, neatly bound with black, and covered with
+    a white lace drapery, just as if it were a saint's. It was broken a
+    little in taking it out of the grave; and a few years ago, some
+    English officers borrowed it to look at, and were horrible enough to
+    pull out some of the teeth. Tell Uncle Jack the head is very broad
+    above the ears, but the forehead is small.
+
+    The chaplain also showed us a copy of an old painting of the first
+    convent, Indian lodges, Madame de la Peltrie's house, and Madame
+    herself, very splendidly dressed, with an Indian chief before her,
+    and some French cavaliers riding down an avenue towards her. Then he
+    showed us some of the nuns' work in albums, painted and lettered in a
+    way to give me an idea of old missals. By and by he went into the
+    chapel with us, and it gave such a queer notion of his indoors life
+    to have him put on an overcoat and india-rubbers to go a few rods
+    through the open air to the chapel door: he had not been very well,
+    he said. When he got in, he took off his hat, and put on an octagonal
+    priest's cap, and showed us everything in the kindest way--and his
+    manners were exquisite. There were beautiful paintings sent out from
+    France at the time of the Revolution; and wood-carvings round the
+    high-altar, done by Quebec artists in the beginning of the last
+    century; for he said they had a school of arts then at St. Anne's,
+    twenty miles below the city. Then there was an ivory crucifix, so
+    life-like that you could scarcely bear to look at it. But what I most
+    cared for was the tiny twinkle of a votive lamp which he pointed out
+    to us in one corner of the nuns' chapel: it was lit a hundred and
+    fifty years ago by two of our French officers when their sister took
+    the veil, and has never been extinguished since, except during the
+    siege of 1759. Of course, I think a story might be written about
+    _this_; and the truth is, the possibilities of fiction in Quebec are
+    overpowering; I go about in a perfect haze of romances, and meet
+    people at every turn who have nothing to do but invite the passing
+    novelist into their houses, and have their likenesses done at once
+    for heroes and heroines. They needn't change a thing about them, but
+    sit just as they are; and if this is in the present, only think how
+    the whole past of Quebec must be crying out to be put into historical
+    romances!
+
+    I wish you could see the houses, and how substantial they are. I
+    can only think of Eriecreek as an assemblage of huts and bark-lodges
+    in contrast. Our boarding-house is comparatively slight, and has
+    stone walls only a foot and a half thick, but the average is two
+    feet and two and a half; and the other day Dick went through the
+    Laval University,--he goes everywhere and gets acquainted with
+    everybody,--and saw the foundation walls of the first building, which
+    have stood all the sieges and conflagrations since the seventeenth
+    century; and no wonder, for they are six feet thick, and form a
+    series of low-vaulted corridors, as heavy, he says, as the casemates
+    of a fortress. There is a beautiful old carved staircase there, of
+    the same date; and he liked the president, a priest, ever so much;
+    and we like the looks of all the priests we see; they are so handsome
+    and polite, and they all speak English, with some funny little
+    defect. The other day, we asked such a nice young priest about the
+    way to Hare Point, where it is said the Recollet friars had their
+    first mission on the marshy meadows: he didn't know of this bit of
+    history, and we showed him our book. "Ah! you see, the book say
+    'pro-_bab_-ly the site.' If it had said _certainly_, I should have
+    known. But pro-_bab_-ly, pro-_bab_-ly, you see!" However, he showed
+    us the way, and down we went through the Lower Town, and out past the
+    General Hospital to this Pointe aux Lievres, which is famous also
+    because somewhere near it, on the St. Charles, Jacques Cartier
+    wintered in 1536, and kidnapped the Indian king Donnacona, whom he
+    carried to France. And it was here Montcalm's forces tried to rally
+    after their defeat by Wolfe. (Please read this several times to Uncle
+    Jack, so that he can have it impressed upon him how faithful I am in
+    my historical researches.)
+
+    It makes me dreadfully angry and sad to think the French should have
+    been robbed of Quebec, after what they did to build it. But it is
+    still quite a French city in everything, even to sympathy with France
+    in this Prussian war, which you would hardly think they would care
+    about. Our landlady says the very boys in the street know about the
+    battles, and explain, every time the French are beaten, how they were
+    outnumbered and betrayed,--something the way we used to do in the
+    first of our war.
+
+    I suppose you will think I am crazy; but I do wish Uncle Jack would
+    wind up his practice at Eriecreek, and sell the house, and come to
+    live at Quebec. I have been asking prices of things, and I find that
+    everything is very cheap, even according to the Eriecreek standard;
+    we could get a beautiful house on the St. Louis Road for two hundred
+    a year; beef is ten or twelve cents a pound, and everything else in
+    proportion. Then besides that, the washing is sent out into the
+    country to be done by the peasant-women, and there isn't a crumb of
+    bread baked in the house, but it all comes from the bakers; and only
+    think, girls, what a relief that would be! Do get Uncle Jack to
+    consider it _seriously_.
+
+    Since I began this letter the afternoon has worn away--the light from
+    the sunset on the mountains would glorify our supper-table without
+    extra charge, if we lived here--and the twilight has passed, and the
+    moon has come up over the gables and dormer-windows of the convent,
+    and looks into the garden so invitingly that I can't help joining
+    her. So I will put my writing by till to-morrow. The going-to-bed
+    bell has rung, and the red lights have vanished one by one from the
+    windows, and the nuns are asleep, and another set of ghosts is
+    playing in the garden with the copper-colored phantoms of the Indian
+    children of long ago. What! not Madame de la Peltrie? Oh! how do they
+    like those little fibs of yours up in heaven?
+
+    _Sunday afternoon._--As we were at the French cathedral last Sunday,
+    we went to the English to-day; and I could easily have imagined
+    myself in some church of Old England, hearing the royal family prayed
+    for, and listening to the pretty poor sermon delivered with such an
+    English _brogue_. The people, too, had such Englishy faces and such
+    queer little eccentricities of dress; the young lady that sang
+    contralto in the choir wore a scarf like a man's on her hat. The
+    cathedral isn't much, architecturally, I suppose, but it affected me
+    very solemnly, and I couldn't help feeling that it was as much a part
+    of British power and grandeur as the citadel itself. Over the
+    bishop's seat drooped the flag of a Crimean regiment, tattered by
+    time and battles, which was hung up here with great ceremonies, in
+    1860, when the Prince of Wales presented them with new colors; and up
+    in the gallery was a kind of glorified pew for royal highnesses and
+    governor-generals and so forth, to sit in when they are here. There
+    are tablets and monumental busts about the walls; and one to the
+    memory of the Duke of Lenox, the governor-general who died in the
+    middle of the last century from the bite of a fox; which seemed an
+    odd fate for a duke, and somehow made me very sorry for him.
+
+    Fanny, of course, couldn't go to church with me, and Dick got out of
+    it by lingering too late over the newspapers at the hotel, and so I
+    trudged off with our Bostonian, who is still with us here. I didn't
+    dwell much upon him in my last letter, and I don't believe now I can
+    make him quite clear to you. He has been a good deal abroad, and he
+    is Europeanized enough not to think much of America, though I can't
+    find that he quite approves of Europe, and his experience seems not
+    to have left him any particular country in either hemisphere.
+
+    He isn't the Bostonian of Uncle Jack's imagination, and I suspect he
+    wouldn't like to be. He is rather too young, still, to have much of
+    an antislavery record, and even if he had lived soon enough, I think
+    that he would not have been a John Brown man. I am afraid that he
+    believes in "vulgar and meretricious distinctions" of all sorts, and
+    that he hasn't an atom of "magnanimous democracy" in him. In fact, I
+    find, to my great astonishment, that some ideas which I thought were
+    held only in England, and which I had never seriously thought of,
+    seem actually a part of Mr. Arbuton's nature or education. He talks
+    about the lower classes, and tradesmen, and the best people, and good
+    families, as I supposed nobody in _this_ country _ever_ did,--in
+    earnest. To be sure, I have always been reading of characters who had
+    such opinions, but I thought they were just put into novels to eke
+    out somebody's unhappiness,--to keep the high-born daughter from
+    marrying beneath her for love, and so on; or else to be made fun of
+    in the person of some silly old woman or some odious snob; and I
+    could hardly believe at first that our Bostonian was serious in
+    talking in that way. Such things sound so differently in real life;
+    and I laughed at them till I found that he didn't know what to make
+    of my laughing, and then I took leave to differ with him in some of
+    his notions; but he never disputes anything I say, and so makes it
+    seem rude to differ with him. I always feel, though he begins it,
+    as if I had thrust my opinions upon him. But in spite of his
+    weaknesses and disagreeabilities, there is something really _high_
+    about him; he is so scrupulously true, so exactly just, that Uncle
+    Jack himself couldn't be more so; though you can see that he respects
+    his virtues as the peculiar result of some extraordinary system. Here
+    at Quebec, though he goes round patronizing the landscape and the
+    antiquities, and coldly smiling at my little enthusiasms, there is
+    really a great deal that ought to be at least improving in him. I get
+    to paying him the same respect that he pays himself, and imbues his
+    very clothes with, till everything he has on appears to look like him
+    and respect itself accordingly. I have often wondered what his hat,
+    his honored hat, for instance, would do, if I should throw it out of
+    the front window. It would make an earthquake, I believe.
+
+    He is politely curious about us; and from time to time, in a
+    shrinking, disgusted way, he asks some leading question about
+    Eriecreek, which he doesn't seem able to form any idea of, as much
+    as I explain it. He clings to his original notion, that it is in the
+    heart of the Oil Regions, of which he has seen pictures in the
+    illustrated papers; and when I assert myself against his opinions, he
+    treats me very gingerly, as if I were an explosive sprite, or an
+    inflammable naiad from a torpedoed well, and it wouldn't be quite
+    safe to oppose me, or I would disappear with a flash and a bang.
+
+    When Dick isn't able to go with me on Fanny's account, Mr. Arbuton
+    takes his place in the expeditionary corps; and we have visited a
+    good many points of interest together, and now and then he talks very
+    entertainingly about his travels. But I don't think they have made
+    him very cosmopolitan. It seems as if he went about with a little
+    imaginary standard, and was chiefly interested in things, to see
+    whether they fitted it or not. Trifling matters annoy him; and when
+    he finds sublimity mixed up with absurdity, it almost makes him
+    angry. One of the oddest and oldest-looking buildings in Quebec is a
+    little one-story house on St. Louis Street, to which poor General
+    Montgomery was taken after he was shot; and it is a pastry-cook's
+    now, and the tarts and cakes in the window vexed Mr. Arbuton so
+    much--not that he seemed to care for Montgomery--that I didn't dare
+    to laugh.
+
+    I live very little in the nineteenth century at present, and do not
+    care much for people who do. Still I have a few grains of affection
+    left for Uncle Jack, which I want you to give him.
+
+    I suppose it will take about six stamps to pay this letter. I forgot
+    to say that Dick goes to be barbered every day at the "Montcalm
+    Shaving and Shampooing Saloon," so called because they say Montcalm
+    held his last council of war there. It is a queer little steep-roofed
+    house, with a flowering bean up the front, and a bit of garden, full
+    of snap-dragons, before it.
+
+    We shall be here a week or so yet, at any rate, and then, I think, we
+    shall go straight home, Dick has lost so much time already.
+
+    With a great deal of love,
+
+    Your Kitty.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM.
+
+
+With the two young people whose days now lapsed away together, it could
+not be said that Monday varied much from Tuesday, or ten o'clock from
+half past three; they were not always certain what day of the week it
+was, and sometimes they fancied that a thing which happened in the
+morning had taken place yesterday afternoon.
+
+But whatever it was, and however uncertain in time and character their
+slight adventure was to themselves, Mrs. Ellison secured all possible
+knowledge of it from Kitty. Since it was her misfortune that promoted
+it, she considered herself a martyr to Kitty's acquaintance with Mr.
+Arbuton, and believed that she had the best claim to any gossip that
+could come of it. She lounged upon her sofa, and listened with a
+patience superior to the maiden caprice with which her inquisition was
+sometimes met; for if that delayed her satisfaction it also employed her
+arts, and the final triumph of getting everything out of Kitty afforded
+her a delicate self-flattery. But commonly the young girl was ready
+enough to speak, for she was glad to have the light of a worldlier mind
+and a greater experience than her own on Mr. Arbuton's character: if
+Mrs. Ellison was not the wisest head, still talking him over was at
+least a relief from thinking him over; and then, at the end of the ends,
+when were ever two women averse to talk of a man?
+
+She commonly sought Fanny's sofa when she returned from her rambles
+through the city, and gave a sufficiently strict account of what had
+happened. This was done light-heartedly and with touches of burlesque
+and extravagance at first; but the reports grew presently to have a more
+serious tone, and latterly Kitty had been so absent at times that she
+would fall into a puzzled silence in the midst of her narration; or else
+she would meet a long procession of skilfully marshalled questions with
+a flippancy that no one but a martyr could have suffered. But Mrs.
+Ellison bore all and would have borne much more in that cause. Battled
+at one point, she turned to another, and the sum of her researches was
+often a clearer perception of Kitty's state of mind than the young girl
+herself possessed. For her, indeed, the whole affair was full of mystery
+and misgiving.
+
+"Our acquaintance has the charm of novelty every time we meet," she said
+once, when pressed hard by Mrs. Ellison. "We are growing better
+strangers, Mr. Arbuton and I. By and by, some morning, we shall not know
+each other by sight. I can barely recognize him now, though I thought I
+knew him pretty well once. I want you to understand that I speak as an
+unbiassed spectator, Fanny."
+
+"O Kitty! how can you accuse me of trying to pry into your affairs!"
+cries injured Mrs. Ellison, and settles herself in a more comfortable
+posture for listening.
+
+"I don't accuse you of anything. I'm sure you've a right to know
+everything about me. Only, I want you really to know."
+
+"Yes, dear," says the matron, with hypocritical meekness.
+
+"Well," resumes Kitty, "there are things that puzzle me more and more
+about him,--things that used to amuse me at first, because I didn't
+actually believe that they could be, and that I felt like defying
+afterwards. But now I can't bear up against them. They frighten me, and
+seem to deny me the right to be what I believe I am."
+
+"I don't understand you, Kitty."
+
+"Why, you've seen how it is with us at home, and how Uncle Jack has
+brought us up. We never had a rule for anything except to do what was
+right, and to be careful of the rights of others."
+
+"Well."
+
+"Well, Mr. Arbuton seems to have lived in a world where everything is
+regulated by some rigid law that it would be death to break. Then, you
+know, at home we are always talking about people, and discussing them;
+but we always talk of each person for what he is in himself, and I
+always thought a person could refine himself if he tried, and was
+sincere, and not conceited. But _he_ seems to judge people according to
+their origin and locality and calling, and to believe that all
+refinement must come from just such training and circumstances as his
+own. Without exactly saying so, he puts everything else quite out of the
+question. He doesn't appear to dream that there can be any different
+opinion. He tramples upon all that I have been taught to believe; and
+though I cling the closer to my idols, I can't help, now and then,
+trying myself by his criterions; and then I find myself wanting in every
+civilized trait, and my whole life coarse and poor, and all my
+associations hopelessly degraded. I think his ideas are hard and narrow,
+and I believe that even my little experience would prove them false; but
+then, they are his, and I can't reconcile them with what I see is good
+in him."
+
+Kitty spoke with half-averted face where she sat beside one of the front
+windows, looking absently out on the distant line of violet hills beyond
+Charlesbourg, and now and then lifting her glove from her lap and
+letting it drop again.
+
+"Kitty," said Mrs. Ellison in reply to her difficulties, "you oughtn't
+to sit against a light like that. It makes your profile quite black to
+any one back in the room."
+
+"O well, Fanny, I'm not black in reality."
+
+"Yes, but a young lady ought always to think how she is looking. Suppose
+some one was to come in."
+
+"Dick's the only one likely to come in just now, and he wouldn't mind
+it. But if you like it better, I'll come and sit by you," said Kitty,
+and took her place beside the sofa.
+
+Her hat was in her hand, her sack on her arm; the fatigue of a recent
+walk gave her a soft pallor, and languor of face and attitude. Mrs.
+Ellison admired her pretty looks with a generous regret that they should
+be wasted on herself, and then asked, "Where were you this afternoon?"
+
+"O, we went to the Hotel Dieu, for one thing, and afterwards we looked
+into the court-yard of the convent; and there another of his pleasant
+little traits came out,--a way he has of always putting you in the wrong
+even when it's a matter of no consequence any way, and there needn't be
+any right or wrong about it. I remembered the place because Mrs. March,
+you know, showed us a rose that one of the nuns in the hospital gave
+her, and I tried to tell Mr. Arbuton about it, and he graciously took it
+as if poor Mrs. March had made an advance towards his acquaintance. I do
+wish you could see what a lovely place that court-yard is, Fanny. It's
+so strange that such a thing should be right there, in the heart of this
+crowded city; but there it was, with its peasant cottage on one side,
+and its long, low barns on the other, and those wide-horned Canadian
+cows munching at the racks of hay outside, and pigeons and chickens all
+about among their feet--"
+
+"Yes, yes; never mind all that, Kitty. You know I hate nature. Go on
+about Mr. Arbuton," said Mrs. Ellison, who did not mean a sarcasm.
+
+"It looked like a farmyard in a picture, far out in the country
+somewhere," resumed Kitty; "and Mr. Arbuton did it the honor to say it
+was just like Normandy."
+
+"Kitty!"
+
+"He did, indeed, Fanny; and the cows didn't go down on their knees out
+of gratitude, either. Well, off on the right were the hospital buildings
+climbing up, you know, with their stone walls and steep roofs, and
+windows dropped about over them, like our convent here; and there was an
+artist there, sketching it all; he had such a brown, pleasant face, with
+a little black mustache and imperial, and such gay black eyes that
+nobody could help falling in love with him; and he was talking in such a
+free-and-easy way with the lazy workmen and women overlooking him. He
+jotted down a little image of the Virgin in a niche on the wall, and one
+of the people called out,--Mr. Arbuton was translating,--'Look there!
+with one touch he's made our Blessed Lady.' 'O,' says the painter,
+'that's nothing; with three touches I can make the entire Holy Family.'
+And they all laughed; and that little joke, you know, won my heart,--I
+don't hear many jokes from Mr. Arbuton;--and so I said what a blessed
+life a painter's must be, for it would give you a right to be a vagrant,
+and you could wander through the world, seeing everything that was
+lovely and funny, and nobody could blame you; and I wondered everybody
+who had the chance didn't learn to sketch. Mr. Arbuton took it
+seriously, and said people had to have something more than the chance to
+learn before they could sketch, and that most of them were an affliction
+with their sketchbooks, and he had seen too much of the sad effects of
+drawing from casts. And he put me in the wrong, as he always does. Don't
+you see? I didn't want to learn drawing; I wanted to be a painter, and
+go about sketching beautiful old convents, and sit on camp-stools on
+pleasant afternoons, and joke with people. Of course, he couldn't
+understand that. But I know the artist could. O Fanny, if it had only
+been the painter whose arm I took that first day on the boat, instead of
+Mr. Arbuton! But the worst of it is, he is making a hypocrite of me, and
+a cowardly, unnatural girl. I wanted to go nearer and look at the
+painter's sketch; but I was ashamed to say I'd never seen a real
+artist's sketch before, and I'm getting to be ashamed, or to seem
+ashamed, of a great many innocent things. He has a way of not seeming to
+think it possible that any one he associates with can differ from him.
+And I do differ from him. I differ from him as much as my whole past
+life differs from his; I know I'm just the kind of production that he
+disapproves of, and that I'm altogether irregular and unauthorized and
+unjustifiable; and though it's funny to have him talking to me as if I
+must have the sympathy of a rich girl with his ideas, it's provoking,
+too, and it's very bad for me. Up to the present moment, Fanny, if you
+want to know, that's the principal effect of Mr. Arbuton on me. I'm
+being gradually snubbed and scared into treasons, stratagems, and
+spoils."
+
+Mrs. Ellison did not find all this so very grievous, for she was one of
+those women who like a snub from the superior sex, if it does not
+involve a slight to their beauty or their power of pleasing. But she
+thought it best not to enter into the question, and merely said, "But
+surely, Kitty, there are a great many things in Mr. Arbuton that you
+must respect."
+
+"Respect? O, yes, indeed! But respect isn't just the thing for one who
+seems to consider himself sacred. Say _revere_, Fanny; say revere!"
+
+Kitty had risen from her chair, but Mrs. Ellison waved her again to her
+seat with an imploring gesture. "Don't go, Kitty; I'm not half done with
+you yet. You _must_ tell me something more. You've stirred me up so,
+now. I know you don't always have such disagreeable times. You've often
+come home quite happy. What do you generally find to talk about? Do tell
+me some particulars for once."
+
+"Why, little topics come up, you know. But sometimes we don't talk at
+all, because I don't like to say what I think or feel, for fear I should
+be thinking or feeling something vulgar. Mr. Arbuton is rather a blight
+upon conversation in that way. He makes you doubtful whether there isn't
+something a little common in breathing and the circulation of the blood,
+and whether it wouldn't be true refinement to stop them."
+
+"Stuff, Kitty! He's very cultivated, isn't he? Don't you talk about
+books? He's read everything, I suppose."
+
+"O yes, he's _read_ enough."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Nothing. Only sometimes it seems to me as if he hadn't read because he
+loved it, but because he thought it due to himself. But maybe I'm
+mistaken. I could imagine a delicate poem shutting up half its sweetness
+from his cold, cold scrutiny,--if you will excuse the floweriness of the
+idea."
+
+"Why, Kitty! don't you think he's refined? I'm sure, I think he's a
+_very_ refined person."
+
+"He's a very elaborated person. But I don't think it would make much
+difference to him what our opinion of him was. His own good opinion
+would be quite enough."
+
+"Is he--is he--always agreeable?"
+
+"I thought we were discussing his mind, Fanny. I don't know that I feel
+like enlarging upon his manners," said Kitty, slyly.
+
+"But surely, Kitty," said the matron, with an air of argument, "there's
+some connection between his mind and his manners."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so. I don't think there's much between his heart and his
+manners. They seem to have been put on him instead of having come out of
+him. He's very well trained, and nine times out of ten he's so
+exquisitely polite that it's wonderful; but the tenth time he may say
+something so rude that you can't believe it."
+
+"Then you like him nine times out of ten."
+
+"I didn't say that. But for the tenth time, it's certain, his training
+doesn't hold out, and he seems to have nothing natural to fall back
+upon. But you can believe that, if he knew he'd been disagreeable, he'd
+be sorry for it."
+
+"Why, then, Kitty, how can you say that there's no connection between
+his heart and manners? This very thing proves that they come from his
+heart. Don't be illogical, Kitty," said Mrs. Ellison, and her nerves
+added, _sotto voce_, "if you _are_ so abominably provoking!"
+
+"O," responded the young girl, with the kind of laugh that meant it was,
+after all, not such a laughing matter, "I didn't say he'd be sorry for
+_you_! Perhaps he would; but he'd be certain to be sorry for himself.
+It's with his politeness as it is with his reading; he seems to consider
+it something that's due to himself as a gentleman to treat people well;
+and it isn't in the least as if he cared for _them_. He wouldn't like to
+fail in such a point."
+
+"But, Kitty, isn't that to his credit?"
+
+"Maybe. I don't say. If I knew more about the world, perhaps I should
+admire it. But now, you see,"--and here Kitty's laugh grew more natural,
+and she gave a subtle caricature of Mr. Arbuton's air and tone as she
+spoke,--"I can't help feeling that it's a little--vulgar."
+
+Mrs. Ellison could not quite make out how much Kitty really meant of
+what she had said. She gasped once or twice for argument; then she sat
+up, and beat the sofa-pillows vengefully in composing herself anew, and
+finally, "Well, Kitty, I'm sure I don't know what to make of it all,"
+she said with a sigh.
+
+"Why, we're not obliged to make anything of it, Fanny, there's that
+comfort," replied Kitty; and then there was a silence, while she brooded
+over the whole affair of her acquaintance with Mr. Arbuton, which this
+talk had failed to set in a more pleasant or hopeful light. It had begun
+like a romance; she had pleased her fancy, if not her heart, with the
+poetry of it; but at last she felt exiled and strange in his presence.
+She had no right to a different result, even through any deep feeling in
+the matter; but while she owned, with her half-sad, half-comical
+consciousness, that she had been tacitly claiming and expecting too
+much, she softly pitied herself, with a kind of impersonal compassion,
+as if it wore some other girl whose pretty dream had been broken. Its
+ruin involved the loss of another ideal; for she was aware that there
+had been gradually rising in her mind an image of Boston, different
+alike from the holy place of her childhood, the sacred city of the
+antislavery heroes and martyrs, and from the jesting, easy, sympathetic
+Boston of Mr. and Mrs. March. This new Boston with which Mr. Arbuton
+inspired her was a Boston of mysterious prejudices and lofty
+reservations; a Boston of high and difficult tastes, that found its
+social ideal in the Old World, and that shrank from contact with the
+reality of this; a Boston as alien as Europe to her simple experiences,
+and that seemed to be proud only of the things that were unlike other
+American things; a Boston that would rather perish by fire and sword
+than be suspected of vulgarity; a critical, fastidious, and reluctant
+Boston, dissatisfied with the rest of the hemisphere, and gelidly
+self-satisfied in so far as it was not in the least the Boston of her
+fond preconceptions. It was, doubtless, no more the real Boston we know
+and love, than either of the others: and it perplexed her more than it
+need, even if it had not been mere phantasm. It made her suspicious of
+Mr. Arbuton's behavior towards her, and observant of little things that
+might very well have otherwise escaped her. The bantering humor, the
+light-hearted trust and self-reliance with which she had once met him
+deserted her, and only returned fitfully when some accident called her
+out of herself, and made her forget the differences that she now too
+plainly saw in their ways of thinking and feeling. It was a greater and
+greater effort to place herself in sympathy with him; she relaxed into a
+languid self-contempt, as if she had been playing a part, when she
+succeeded. "Sometimes, Fanny," she said, now, after a long pause,
+speaking in behalf of that other girl she had been thinking of, "it
+seems to me as if Mr. Arbuton were all gloves and slim umbrella,--the
+mere husk of well dressed culture and good manners. His looks _do_
+promise everything; but O dear me! I should be sorry for any one that
+was in love with him. Just imagine some girl meeting with such a man,
+and taking a fancy to him! I suppose she never would quite believe but
+that he must somehow be what she first thought him, and she would go
+down to her grave believing that she had failed to understand him. What
+a curious story it would make!"
+
+"Then, why don't you write it, Kitty?" asked Mrs. Ellison. "No one could
+do it better."
+
+Kitty flushed quickly; then she smiled: "O, I don't think I could do it
+at all. It wouldn't be a very easy story to work out. Perhaps he might
+never do anything positively disagreeable enough to make anybody condemn
+him. The only way you could show his character would be to have her do
+and say hateful things to him, when she couldn't help it, and then
+repent of it, while he was impassively perfect through everything. And
+perhaps, after all, he might be regarded by some stupid people as the
+injured one. Well, Mr. Arbuton has been very polite to us, I'm sure,
+Fanny," she said after another pause, as she rose from her chair, "and
+maybe I'm unjust to him. I beg his pardon of you; and I wish," she added
+with a dull disappointment quite her own, and a pang of surprise at
+words that seemed to utter themselves, "that he would go away."
+
+"Why, Kitty, I'm shocked," said Mrs. Ellison, rising from her cushions.
+
+"Yes; so am I, Fanny."
+
+"Are you really tired of him, then?"
+
+Kitty did not answer, but turned away her face a little, where she stood
+beside the chair in which she had been sitting.
+
+Mrs. Ellison put out her hand towards her. "Kitty, come here," she said
+with imperious tenderness.
+
+"No, I won't, Fanny," answered the young girl, in a trembling voice. She
+raised the glove that she had been nervously swinging back and forth,
+and bit hard upon the button of it. "I don't know whether I'm tired of
+_him_,--though he isn't a person to rest one a great deal,--but I'm
+tired of _it_. I'm perplexed and troubled the whole time, and I don't
+see any end to it. Yes, I wish he would go away! Yes, he _is_ tiresome.
+What is he staying here for? If he thinks himself so much better than
+all of us, I wonder he troubles himself with our company. It's quite
+time for him to go. No, Fanny, no," cried Kitty with a little broken
+laugh, still rejecting the outstretched hand, "I'll be flat in private,
+if you please." And dashing her hand across her eyes, she flitted out of
+the room. At the door she turned and said,
+
+"You needn't think it's what you think it is, Fanny."
+
+"No indeed, dear; you're just overwrought."
+
+"For I really wish he'd go."
+
+But it was on this very day that Mr. Arbuton found it harder than ever
+to renew his resolution of quitting Quebec, and cutting short at once
+his acquaintance with these people. He had been pledging himself to this
+in some form every day, and every morrow had melted his resolution away.
+Whatever was his opinion of Colonel and Mrs. Ellison, it is certain
+that, if he considered Kitty merely in relation to the present, he could
+not have said how, by being different, she could have been better than
+she was. He perceived a charm, that would be recognized anywhere, in her
+manner, though it was not of his world; her fresh pleasure in all she
+saw, though he did not know how to respond to it, was very winning; he
+respected what he thought the good sense running through her transports;
+he wondered at the culture she had somewhere, somehow got; and he was so
+good as to find that her literary enthusiasms had nothing offensive, but
+were as pretty and naive as a girl's love of flowers. Moreover, he
+approved of some personal attributes of hers: a low, gentle voice,
+tender long-lashed eyes; a trick of drooping shoulders, and of idle
+hands fallen into the lap, one in the other's palm; a serene repose of
+face; a light and eager laugh. There was nothing so novel in those
+traits, and in different combination he had seen them a thousand times;
+yet in her they strangely wrought upon his fancy. She had that soft,
+kittenish way with her which invites a caressing patronage, but, as he
+learned, she had also the kittenish equipment for resenting
+over-condescension; and she never took him half so much as when she
+showed the high spirit that was in her, and defied him most.
+
+For here and now, it was all well enough; but he had a future to which
+he owed much, and a conscience that would not leave him at rest. The
+fascination of meeting her so familiarly under the same roof, the
+sorcery of the constant sight of her, were becoming too much; it would
+not do on any account; for his own sake he must put an end to it. But
+from hour to hour he lingered upon his unenforced resolve. The passing
+days, that brought him doubts in which he shuddered at the great
+difference between himself and her and her people, brought him also
+moments of blissful forgetfulness in which his misgivings were lost in
+the sweetness of her looks, or the young grace of her motions. Passing,
+the days rebuked his delay in vain; a week and two weeks slipped from
+under his feet, and still he had waited for fate to part him and his
+folly. But now at last he would go and in the evening, after his cigar
+on Durham Terrace, he knocked at Mrs. Ellison's door to say that on the
+day after to-morrow he should push on to the White Mountains.
+
+He found the Ellisons talking over an expedition for the next morning,
+in which he was also to take part. Mrs. Ellison had already borne her
+full share in the preparation; for, being always at hand there in her
+room, and having nothing to do, she had been almost a willing victim to
+the colonel's passion for information at second-hand, and had probably
+come to know more than any other American woman of Arnold's expedition
+against Quebec in 1775. She know why the attack was planned, and with
+what prodigious hazard and heroical toil and endurance it was carried
+out; how the dauntless little army of riflemen cut their way through the
+untrodden forests of Maine and Canada, and beleaguered the gray old
+fortress on her rock till the red autumn faded into winter, and, on the
+last bitter night of the year, flung themselves against her defences,
+and fell back, leaving half their number captive, Montgomery dead, and
+Arnold wounded, but haplessly destined to survive.
+
+"Yes," said the colonel, "considering the age in which they lived, and
+their total lack of modern improvements, mental, moral, and physical, we
+must acknowledge that they did pretty well. It wasn't on a very large
+scale; but I don't see how they could have been braver, if every man had
+been multiplied by ten thousand. In fact, as it's going to be all the
+same thing a hundred years from now, I don't know but I'd as soon be one
+of the men that tried to take Quebec as one of the men that did take
+Atlanta. Of course, for the present, and on account of my afflicted
+family, Mr. Arbuton, I'm willing to be what and where I am; but just see
+what those fellows did." And the colonel drew from his glowing memory of
+Mrs. Ellison's facts a brave historical picture of Arnold's expedition.
+"And now we're going to-morrow morning to look up the scene of the
+attack on the 31st of December. Kitty, sing something."
+
+At another time Kitty might have hesitated; but that evening she was so
+at rest about Mr. Arbuton, so sure she cared nothing for his liking or
+disliking anything she did, that she sat down at the piano, and sang a
+number of songs, which I suppose were as unworthy the cultivated ear as
+any he had heard. But though they were given with an untrained voice and
+a touch as little skilled as might be, they pleased, or else the singer
+pleased. The simple-hearted courage of the performance would alone have
+made it charming; and Mr. Arbuton had no reason to ask himself how he
+should like it in Boston, if he were married, and should hear it from
+his wife there. Yet when a young man looks at a young girl or listens to
+her, a thousand vagaries possess his mind,--formless imaginations,
+lawless fancies. The question that presented itself remotely, like pain
+in a dream, dissolved in the ripple of the singer's voice, and left his
+revery the more luxuriously untroubled for having been.
+
+He remembered, after saying good-night, that he had forgotten something:
+it was to tell them he was going away.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+NEXT MORNING.
+
+
+Quebec lay shining in the tender oblique light of the northern sun when
+they passed next morning through the Upper Town market-place and took
+their way towards Hope Gate, where they were to be met by the colonel a
+little later. It is easy for the alert tourist to lose his course in
+Quebec, and they, who were neither hurried nor heedful, went easily
+astray. But the street into which they had wandered, if it did not lead
+straight to Hope Gate, had many merits, and was very characteristic of
+the city. Most of the houses on either hand were low structures of one
+story, built heavily of stone or stuccoed brick, with two
+dormer-windows, full of house-plants, in each roof; the doors were each
+painted of a livelier color than the rest of the house, and each
+glistened with a polished brass knob, a large brass knocker, or an
+intricate bell-pull of the same resplendent metal, and a plate bearing
+the owner's name and his professional title, which if not _avocat_ was
+sure to be _notaire_, so well is Quebec supplied with those ministers of
+the law. At the side of each house was a _porte-cochere_, and in this a
+smaller door. The thresholds and doorsteps were covered with the neatest
+and brightest oil-cloth; the wooden sidewalk was very clean, like the
+steep, roughly paved street itself; and at the foot of the hill down
+which it sloped was a breadth of the city wall, pierced for musketry,
+and, past the corner of one of the houses, the half-length of cannon
+showing. It had the charm of those ancient streets, dear to Old-World
+travel, in which the past and the present, decay and repair, peace and
+war, have made friends in an effect that not only wins the eye, but,
+however illogically, touches the heart; and over the top of the wall it
+had a stretch of such landscape as I know not what Old-World street can
+command: the St. Lawrence, blue and wide; a bit of the white village of
+Beauport on its bank; then a vast breadth of pale-green, upward-sloping
+meadows; then the purple heights; and the hazy heaven over them.
+Half-way down this happy street sat the artist whom they had seen before
+in the court of the Hotel Dieu; he was sketching something, and evoking
+the curious life of the neighborhood. Two schoolboys in the uniform of
+the Seminary paused to look at him as they loitered down the pavement; a
+group of children encircled him; a little girl with her hair in blue
+ribbons talked at a window about him to some one within; a young lady
+opened her casement and gazed furtively at him; a door was set quietly
+ajar, and an old grandam peeped out, shading her eyes with her hand; a
+woman in deep mourning gave his sketch a glance as she passed; a calash
+with a fat Quebecker in it ran into a cart driven by a broad-hatted
+peasant-woman, so eager were both to know what he was drawing; a man
+lingered even at the head of the street, as if it were any use to stop
+there.
+
+As Kitty and Mr. Arbuton passed him, the artist glanced at her with the
+smile of a man who believes he knows how the case stands, and she
+followed his eye in its withdrawal towards the bit he was sketching: an
+old roof, and on top of this a balcony, shut in with green blinds; yet
+higher, a weather-worn, wood-colored gallery, pent-roofed and
+balustered, with a geranium showing through the balusters; a
+dormer-window with hook and tackle, beside an Oriental-shaped pavilion
+with a shining tin dome,--a picturesque confusion of forms which had
+been, apparently, added from time to time without design, and yet were
+full of harmony. The unreasonable succession of roofs had lifted the top
+far above the level of the surrounding houses, into the heart of the
+morning light, and some white doves circled about the pavilion, or
+nestled cooing upon the window-sill, where a young girl sat and sewed.
+
+"Why, it's Hilda in her tower," said Kitty, "of course! And this is just
+the kind of street for such a girl to look down into. It doesn't seem
+like a street in real life, does it? The people all look as if they had
+stepped out of stories, and might step back any moment; and these queer
+little houses: they're the very places for things to happen in!"
+
+Mr. Arbuton smiled forbearingly, as she thought, at this burst, but she
+did not care, and she turned, at the bottom of the street, and lingered
+a few moments for another look at the whole charming picture; and then
+he praised it, and said that the artist was making a very good sketch.
+"I wonder Quebec isn't infested by artists the whole summer long," he
+added. "They go about hungrily picking up bits of the picturesque, along
+our shores and country roads, when they might exchange their famine for
+a feast by coming here."
+
+"I suppose there's a pleasure in finding out the small graces and
+beauties of the poverty-stricken subjects, that they wouldn't have in
+better ones, isn't there?" asked Kitty. "At any rate, if I were to write
+a story, I should want to take the slightest sort of plot, and lay the
+scene in the dullest kind of place, and then bring out all their
+possibilities. I'll tell you a book after my own heart:
+'_Details_,'--just the history of a week in the life of some young
+people who happen together in an old New England country-house; nothing
+extraordinary, little, every-day things told so exquisitely, and all
+fading naturally away without any particular result, only the full
+meaning of everything brought out."
+
+"And don't you think it's rather a sad ending for all to fade away
+without any particular result?" asked the young man, stricken he hardly
+knew how or where. "Besides, I always thought that the author of that
+book found too much meaning in everything. He did for men, I'm sure; but
+I believe women are different, and see much more than we do in a little
+space."
+
+    "'Why has not man a microscopic eye?
+     For this plain reason, man is not a fly,'
+
+nor a woman," mocked Kitty. "Have you read his other books?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Aren't they delightful?"
+
+"They're very well; and I always wondered he could write them. He
+doesn't look it."
+
+"O, have you ever seen him?"
+
+"He lives in Boston, you know."
+
+"Yes, yes; but--" Kitty could not go on and say that she had not
+supposed authors consorted with creatures of common clay; and Mr.
+Arbuton, who was the constant guest of people who would have thought
+most authors sufficiently honored in being received among them to meet
+such men as he, was very far from guessing what was in her mind.
+
+He waited a moment for her, and then said, "He's a very ordinary sort of
+man,--not what one would exactly call a gentleman, you know, in his
+belongings,--and yet his books have nothing of the shop, nothing
+professionally literary, about them. It seems as if almost any of us
+might have written them."
+
+Kitty glanced quickly at him to see if he were jesting; but Mr. Arbuton
+was not easily given to irony, and he was now very much in earnest about
+drawing on his light overcoat, which he had hitherto carried on his arm
+with that scrupulous consideration for it which was not dandyism, but
+part of his self-respect; apparently, as an overcoat, ho cared nothing
+for it; as the overcoat of a man of his condition he cared everything;
+and now, though the sun was so bright on the open spaces, in these
+narrow streets the garment was comfortable.
+
+At another time, Kitty would have enjoyed the care with which he
+smoothed it about his person, but this profanation of her dearest ideals
+made the moment serious. Her pulse quickened, and she said, "I'm afraid
+I can't enter into your feelings. I wasn't taught to respect the idea of
+a gentleman very much. I've often heard my uncle say that, at the best,
+it was a poor excuse for not being just honest and just brave and just
+kind, and a false pretence of being something more. I believe, if I were
+a man, I shouldn't want to be a gentleman. At any rate, I'd rather be
+the author of those books, which any gentleman _might_ have written,
+than all the gentlemen who didn't, put together."
+
+In the career of her indignation she had unconsciously hurried her
+companion forward so swiftly that they had reached Hope Gate as she
+spoke, and interrupted the revery in which Colonel Ellison, loafing up
+against the masonry, was contemplating the sentry in his box.
+
+"You'd better not overheat yourself so early in the day, Kitty," said
+her cousin, serenely, with a glance at her flushed face; "this
+expedition is not going to be any joke."
+
+Now that Prescott Gate, by which so many thousands of Americans have
+entered Quebec since Arnold's excursionists failed to do so, is
+demolished, there is nothing left so picturesque and characteristic as
+Hope Gate, and I doubt if anywhere in Europe there is a more
+mediaeval-looking bit of military architecture. The heavy stone gateway
+is black with age, and the gate, which has probably never been closed in
+our century, is of massive frame set thick with mighty bolts and spikes.
+The wall here sweeps along the brow of the crag on which the city is
+built, and a steep street drops down, by stone-parapeted curves and
+angles, from the Upper to the Lower Town, where, in 1775, nothing but a
+narrow lane bordered the St. Lawrence. A considerable breadth of land
+has since been won from the river, and several streets and many piers
+now stretch between this alley and the water; but the old Sault au
+Matelot still crouches and creeps along under the shelter of the city
+wall and the overhanging rock, which is thickly bearded with weeds and
+grass, and trickles with abundant moisture. It must be an ice-pit in
+winter, and I should think it the last spot on the continent for the
+summer to find; but when the summer has at last found it, the old Sault
+au Matelot puts on a vagabond air of Southern leisure and abandon, not
+to be matched anywhere out of Italy. Looking from that jutting rock near
+Hope Gate, behind which the defeated Americans took refuge from the fire
+of their enemies, the vista is almost unique for a certain scenic
+squalor and gypsy luxury of color: sag-roofed barns and stables, and
+weak-backed, sunken-chested workshops of every sort lounge along in
+tumble-down succession, and lean up against the cliff in every
+imaginable posture of worthlessness and decrepitude; light wooden
+galleries cross to them from the second stories of the houses which back
+upon the alley; and over these galleries flutters, from a labyrinth of
+clothes-lines, a variety of bright-colored garments of all ages, sexes,
+and conditions; while the footway underneath abounds in gossiping women,
+smoking men, idle poultry, cats, children, and large, indolent
+Newfoundland dogs.
+
+"It was through this lane that Arnold's party advanced almost to the
+foot of Mountain Street, where they were to be joined by Montgomery's
+force in an attempt to surprise Prescott Gate," said the colonel, with
+his unerring second-hand history.
+
+    "'You that will follow me to this attempt,'
+
+'Wait till you see the whites of their eyes, and then fire low,' and so
+forth. By the way, do you suppose anybody did that at Bunker Hill, Mr.
+Arbuton? Come, you're a Boston man. My experience is that recruits
+chivalrously fire into the air without waiting to see the enemy at all,
+let alone the whites of their eyes. Why! aren't you coming?" he asked,
+seeing no movement to follow in Kitty or Mr. Arbuton.
+
+"It doesn't look very pleasant under foot, Dick," suggested Kitty.
+
+"Well, upon my word! Is this your uncle's niece? I shall never dare to
+report this panic at Eriecreek."
+
+"I can see the whole length of the alley, and there's nothing in it but
+chickens and domestic animals."
+
+"Very well, as Fanny says; when Uncle Jack--he's _your_ uncle--asks you
+about every inch of the ground that Arnold's men were demoralized over,
+I hope you'll know what to say."
+
+Kitty laughed and said she should try a little invention, if her Uncle
+Jack came down to inches.
+
+"All right, Kitty; you can go along St. Paul Street, there, and Mr.
+Arbuton and I will explore the Sault au Matelot, and come out upon you,
+covered with glory, at the other end."
+
+"I hope it'll be glory," said Kitty, with a glance at the lane, "but I
+think it's more likely to be feathers and chopped straw.--Good by, Mr.
+Arbuton."
+
+"Not in the least," answered the young man; "I'm going with you."
+
+The colonel feigned indignant surprise, and marched briskly down the
+Sault au Matelot alone, while the others took their way through St. Paul
+Street in the same direction, amidst the bustle and business of the
+port, past the banks and great commercial houses, with the encounter of
+throngs of seafaring faces of many nations, and, at the corner of St.
+Peter Street, a glimpse of the national flag thrown out from the
+American Consulate, which intensified for untravelled Kitty her sense of
+remoteness from her native land. At length they turned into the street
+now called Sault au Matelot, into which opens the lane once bearing that
+name, and strolled idly along in the cool shadow, silence, and solitude
+of the street. She was strangely released from the constraint which Mr.
+Arbuton usually put upon her. A certain defiant ease filled her heart;
+she felt and thought whatever she liked, for the first time in many
+days; while he went puzzling himself with the problem of a young lady
+who despised gentlemen, and yet remained charming to him.
+
+A mighty marine smell of oakum and salt-fish was in the air, and "O,"
+sighed Kitty, "doesn't it make you long for distant seas? Shouldn't you
+like to be shipwrecked for half a day or so, Mr. Arbuton?"
+
+"Yes; yes, certainly," he replied absently, and wondered what she
+laughed at. The silence of the place was broken only by the noise of
+coopering which seemed to be going on in every other house; the solitude
+relieved only by the Newfoundland dogs that stretched themselves upon
+the thresholds of the cooper-shops. The monotony of these shops and dogs
+took Kitty's humor, and as they went slowly by she made a jest of them,
+as she used to do with things she saw.
+
+"But here's a door without a dog!" she said, presently. "This can't be a
+genuine cooper-shop, of course, without a dog. O, that accounts for it,
+perhaps!" she added, pausing before the threshold, and glancing up at a
+sign--"_Academie commerciale et litteraire_"--set under an upper window.
+"What a curious place for a seat of learning! What do you suppose is the
+connection between cooper-shops and an academical education, Mr.
+Arbuton?"
+
+She stood looking up at the sign that moved her mirth, and swinging her
+shut parasol idly to and fro, while a light of laughter played over her
+face.
+
+Suddenly a shadow seemed to dart betwixt her and the open doorway, Mr.
+Arbuton was hurled violently against her, and, as she struggled to keep
+her footing under the shock, she saw him bent over a furious dog, that
+hung from the breast of his overcoat, while he clutched its throat with
+both his hands.
+
+He met the terror of her face with a quick glance. "I beg your pardon;
+don't call out please," he said. But from within the shop came loud
+cries and maledictions, "O nom de Dieu c'est le boule-dogue du capitaine
+anglais!" with appalling screams for help; and a wild, uncouth little
+figure of a man, bareheaded, horror-eyed came flying out of the open
+door. He wore a cooper's apron, and he bore in one hand a red-hot iron,
+which, with continuous clamor, he dashed against the muzzle of the
+hideous brute. Without a sound the dog loosed his grip, and, dropping to
+the ground, fled into the obscurity of the shop as silently as he had
+launched himself out of it, while Kitty yet stood spell-bound, and
+before the crowd that the appeal of Mr. Arbuton's rescuer had summoned
+could see what had happened.
+
+Mr. Arbuton lifted himself, and looked angrily round upon the gaping
+spectators, who began, one by one, to take in their heads from their
+windows and to slink back to their thresholds as if they had been guilty
+of something much worse than a desire to succor a human being in peril.
+
+"Good heavens!" said Mr. Arbuton, "what an abominable scene!" His face
+was deadly pale, as he turned from these insolent intruders to his
+deliverer, whom he saluted, with a "Merci bien!" spoken in a cold,
+steady voice. Then he drew off his overcoat, which had been torn by the
+dog's teeth and irreparably dishonored in the encounter. He looked at it
+shuddering, with a countenance of intense disgust, and made a motion as
+if to hurl it into the street. But his eye again fell upon the cooper's
+squalid little figure, as he stood twisting his hands into his apron,
+and with voluble eagerness protesting that it was not his dog, but that
+of the English ship-captain, who had left it with him, and whom he had
+many a time besought to have the beast killed. Mr. Arbuton, who seemed
+not to hear what he was saying, or to be so absorbed in something else
+as not to consider whether he was to blame or not, broke in upon him in
+French: "You've done me the greatest service. I cannot repay you, but
+you must take this," he said, as he thrust a bank-note into the little
+man's grimy hand.
+
+"O, but it is too much! But it is like a monsieur so brave, so--"
+
+"Hush! It was nothing," interrupted Mr. Arbuton again. Then he threw his
+overcoat upon the man's shoulder. "If you will do me the pleasure to
+receive this also? Perhaps you can make use of it."
+
+"Monsieur heaps me with benefits;--monsieur--" began the bewildered
+cooper; but Mr. Arbuton turned abruptly away from him toward Kitty, who
+trembled at having shared the guilt of the other spectators, and seizing
+her hand, he placed it on his arm, where he held it close as he strode
+away, leaving his deliverer planted in the middle of the sidewalk and
+staring after him. She scarcely dared ask him if he were hurt, as she
+found herself doing now with a faltering voice.
+
+"No, I believe not," he said with a glance at the frock-coat, which was
+buttoned across his chest and was quite intact; and still he strode on,
+with a quick glance at every threshold which did not openly declare a
+Newfoundland dog.
+
+It had all happened so suddenly, and in so brief a time, that she might
+well have failed to understand it, even if she had seen it all. It was
+barely intelligible to Mr. Arbuton himself, who, as Kitty had loitered
+mocking and laughing before the door of the shop, chanced to see the dog
+crouched within, and had only time to leap forward and receive the cruel
+brute on his breast as it flung itself at her.
+
+He had not thought of the danger to himself in what he had done. He knew
+that he was unhurt, but he did not care for that; he cared only that she
+was safe; and as he pressed her hand tight against his heart, there
+passed through it a thrill of inexpressible tenderness, a quick,
+passionate sense of possession, a rapture as of having won her and made
+her his own forever, by saving her from that horrible risk. The maze in
+which he had but now dwelt concerning her seemed an obsolete frivolity
+of an alien past; all the cold doubts and hindering scruples which he
+had felt from the first were gone; gone all his care for his world. His
+world? In that supreme moment, there was no world but in the tender eyes
+at which he looked down with a glance which she knew not how to
+interpret.
+
+She thought that his pride was deeply wounded at the ignominy of his
+adventure,--for she was sure he would care more for that than for the
+danger,--and that if she spoke of it she might add to the angry pain he
+felt. As they hurried along she waited for him to speak, but he did not;
+though always, as he looked down at her with that strange look, he
+seemed about to speak.
+
+Presently she stopped, and, withdrawing her hand from his arm, she
+cried, "Why, we've forgotten my cousin!"
+
+"O--yes!" said Mr. Arbuton with a vacant smile.
+
+Looking back they saw the colonel standing on the pavement near the end
+of the old Sault au Matelot, with his hands in his pockets, and
+steadfastly staring at them. He did not relax the severity of his gaze
+when they returned to join him, and appeared to find little consolation
+in Kitty's "O Dick, I forgot all about you," given with a sudden,
+inexplicable laugh, interrupted and renewed as some ludicrous image
+seemed to come and go in her mind.
+
+"Well, this may be very flattering, Kitty, but it isn't altogether
+comprehensible," said he, with a keen glance at both their faces. "I
+don't know what you'll say to Uncle Jack. It's not forgetting me alone:
+it's forgetting the whole American expedition against Quebec."
+
+The colonel waited for some reply; but Kitty dared not attempt an
+explanation, and Mr. Arbuton was not the man to seem to boast of his
+share of the adventure by telling what had happened, even if he had
+cared at that moment to do so. Her very ignorance of what he had dared
+for her only confirmed his new sense of possession; and, if he could, he
+would not have marred the pleasure he felt by making her grateful yet,
+sweet as that might be in its time. Now he liked to keep his knowledge,
+to have had her unwitting compassion, to hear her pour out her unwitting
+relief in this laugh, while he superiorly permitted it.
+
+"I don't understand this thing," said the colonel, through whose dense,
+masculine intelligence some suspicions of love-making were beginning to
+pierce. But he dismissed them as absurd, and added, "However, I'm
+willing to forgive, and you've done the forgetting; and all that I ask
+now is the pleasure of your company on the spot where Montgomery fell.
+Fanny'll never believe I've found it unless you go with me," he
+appealed, finally.
+
+"O, we'll go, by all means," said Mr. Arbuton, unconsciously speaking,
+as by authority, for both.
+
+They came into busier streets of the Port again, and then passed through
+the square of the Lower Town Market, with the market-house in the midst,
+the shops and warehouses on either side, the long row of tented booths
+with every kind of peasant-wares to sell, and the wide stairway dropping
+to the river which brought the abundance of the neighboring country to
+the mart. The whole place was alive with country-folk in carts and
+citizens on foot. At one point a gayly painted wagon was drawn up in the
+midst of a group of people to whom a quackish-faced Yankee was hawking,
+in his own personal French, an American patent-medicine, and making his
+audience giggle. Because Kitty was amused at this, Mr. Arbuton found it
+the drollest thing imaginable, but saw something yet droller when she
+made the colonel look at a peasant, standing in one corner beside a
+basket of fowls, which a woman, coming up to buy, examined as if the
+provision were some natural curiosity, while a crowd at once gathered
+round.
+
+"It requires a considerable population to make a bargain, up here,"
+remarked the colonel. "I suppose they turn out the garrison when they
+sell a beef." For both buyer and seller seemed to take advice of the
+bystanders, who discussed and inspected the different fowls as if
+nothing so novel as poultry had yet fallen in their way.
+
+At last the peasant himself took up the fowls and carefully scrutinized
+them.
+
+"_Those_ chickens, it seems, never happened to catch his eye before,"
+interpreted Kitty; and Mr. Arbuton, who was usually very restive during
+such banter, smiled as if it were the most admirable fooling, or the
+most precious wisdom, in the world. He made them wait to see the bargain
+out, and could, apparently, have lingered there forever.
+
+But the colonel had a conscience about Montgomery, and he hurried them
+away, on past the Queen's Wharf, and down the Cove Road to that point
+where the scarped and rugged breast of the cliff bears the sign, "Here
+fell Montgomery," though he really fell, not half-way up the height, but
+at the foot of it, where stood the battery that forbade his juncture
+with Arnold at Prescott Gate.
+
+A certain wildness yet possesses the spot: the front of the crag, topped
+by the high citadel-wall, is so grim, and the few tough evergreens that
+cling to its clefts are torn and twisted by the winter blasts, and the
+houses are decrepit with age, showing here and there the scars of the
+frequent fires that sweep the Lower Town.
+
+It was quite useless: neither the memories of the place nor their
+setting were sufficient to engage the wayward thoughts of these
+curiously assorted pilgrims; and the colonel, after some attempts to
+bring the matter home to himself and the others, was obliged to abandon
+Mr. Arbuton to his tender reveries of Kitty, and Kitty to her puzzling
+over the change in Mr. Arbuton. His complaisance made her uncomfortable
+and shy of him, it was so strange; it gave her a little shiver, as if he
+were behaving undignifiedly.
+
+"Well, Kitty," said the colonel, "I reckon Uncle Jack would have made
+more out of this than we've done. He'd have had their geology out of
+these rocks, any way."
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+MR. ARBUTON'S INFATUATION.
+
+
+Kitty went as usual to Mrs. Ellison's room after her walk, but she
+lapsed into a deep abstraction as she sat down beside the sofa.
+
+"What are you smiling at?" asked Mrs. Ellison, after briefly supporting
+her abstraction.
+
+"Was I smiling?" asked Kitty, beginning to laugh. "I didn't know it."
+
+"What _has_ happened so very funny?"
+
+"Why, I don't know whether it's so very funny or not. I believe it isn't
+funny at all."
+
+"Then what makes you laugh?"
+
+"I don't know. Was I--"
+
+"Now _don't_ ask me if you were laughing, Kitty. It's a little too much.
+You can talk or not, as you choose; but I don't like to be turned into
+ridicule."
+
+"O Fanny, how can you? I was thinking about something very different.
+But I don't see how I can tell you, without putting Mr. Arbuton in a
+ludicrous light, and it isn't quite fair."
+
+"You're very careful of him, all at once," said Mrs. Ellison. "You
+didn't seem disposed to spare him yesterday so much. I don't understand
+this sudden conversion."
+
+Kitty responded with a fit of outrageous laughter. "Now I see I must
+tell you," she said, and rapidly recounted Mr. Arbuton's adventure.
+
+"Why, I never knew anything so cool and brave, Fanny, and I admired him
+more than ever I did; but then I couldn't help seeing the other side of
+it, you know."
+
+"What other side? I _don't_ know."
+
+"Well, you'd have had to laugh yourself, if you'd seen the lordly way he
+dismissed the poor people who had come running out of their houses to
+help him, and his stateliness in rewarding that little cooper, and his
+heroic parting from his cherished overcoat,--which of course he can't
+replace in Quebec,--and his absent-minded politeness in taking my hand
+under his arm, and marching off with me so magnificently. But the worst
+thing, Fanny,"--and she bowed herself under a tempest of long-pent
+mirth,--"the worst thing was, that the iron, you know, was the cooper's
+branding-iron, and I had a vision of the dog carrying about on his nose,
+as long as he lived, the monogram that marks the cooper's casks as
+holding a certain number of gallons--"
+
+"Kitty, don't be--sacrilegious!" cried Mrs. Ellison.
+
+"No, I'm not," she retorted, gasping and panting. "I never respected Mr.
+Arbuton so much, and you say yourself I haven't shown myself so careful
+of him before. But I never was so glad to see Dick in my life, and to
+have some excuse for laughing. I didn't dare to speak to Mr. Arbuton
+about it, for he couldn't, if he had tried, have let me laugh it out and
+be done with it. I trudged demurely along by his side, and neither of us
+mentioned the matter to Dick," she concluded breathlessly. Then, "I
+don't know why I should tell you now; it seems wicked and cruel," she
+said penitently, almost pensively.
+
+Mrs. Ellison had not been amused. She said, "Well, Kitty, in _some_
+girls I should say it was quite heartless to do as you've done."
+
+"It's heartless in _me_, Fanny; and you needn't say such a thing. I'm
+sure I didn't utter a syllable to wound him, and just before that he'd
+been _very_ disagreeable, and I forgave him because I thought he was
+mortified. And you needn't say that I've no feeling"; and thereupon she
+rose, and, putting her hands into her cousin's, "Fanny," she cried,
+vehemently, "I _have_ been heartless. I'm afraid I haven't shown any
+sympathy or consideration. I'm afraid I must have seemed dreadfully
+callous and hard. I oughtn't to have thought of anything but the danger
+to him; and it seems to me now I scarcely thought of that at all. O, how
+rude it was of me to see anything funny in it! What _can_ I do?"
+
+"Don't go crazy, at any rate, Kitty. _He_ doesn't know that you've been
+laughing about him. You needn't do anything."
+
+"O yes, I need. He doesn't know that I've been laughing about him to
+you; but, don't you see, I laughed when we met Dick; and what can he
+think of that?"
+
+"He just thinks you were nervous, I suppose."
+
+"O, do you suppose he does, Fanny? O, I _wish_ I could believe that! O,
+I'm so horribly ashamed of myself! And here yesterday I was criticising
+him for being unfeeling, and now I've been a thousand times worse than
+he has ever been, or ever could be! O dear, dear, dear!"
+
+"Kitty! hush!" exclaimed Mrs. Ellison; "you run on like a wild thing,
+and you're driving me distracted, by not being like yourself."
+
+"O, it's very well for _you_ to be so calm; but if you didn't know what
+to do, you wouldn't."
+
+"Yes, I would; I don't, and I am."
+
+"But what shall I do?" And Kitty plucked away the hands which Fanny had
+been holding and wrung them. "I'll tell you what I can do," she suddenly
+added, while a gleam of relief dawned upon her face: "I can bear all his
+disagreeable ways after this, as long as he stays, and not say anything
+back. Yes, I'll put up with everything. I'll be as _meek_! He may
+patronize me and snub me and put me in the wrong as much as he pleases.
+And then he won't be _approaching_ my behavior. O Fanny!"
+
+Upon this, Mrs. Ellison said that she was going to give her a good
+scolding for her nonsense, and pulled her down and kissed her, and said
+that she had not done anything, and was, nevertheless, consoled at her
+resolve to expiate her offence by respecting thenceforward Mr. Arbuton's
+foibles and prejudices.
+
+It is not certain how far Kitty would have succeeded in her good
+purposes: these things, so easily conceived, are not of such facile
+execution; she passed a sleepless night of good resolutions and schemes
+of reparation; but, fortunately for her, Mr. Arbuton's foibles and
+prejudices seemed to have fallen into a strange abeyance. The change
+that had come upon him that day remained; he was still Mr. Arbuton, but
+with a difference. He could not undo his whole inherited and educated
+being, and perhaps no chance could deeply affect it without destroying
+the man. He continued hopelessly superior to Colonel and Mrs. Ellison;
+but it is not easy to love a woman and not seek, at least before
+marriage, to please those dear to her. Mr. Arbuton had contested his
+passion at every advance; he had firmly set his face against the fancy
+that, at the beginning, invested this girl with a charm; he had only
+done the things afterwards that mere civilization required; he had
+suffered torments of doubt concerning her fitness for himself and his
+place in society; he was not sure yet that her unknown relations were
+not horribly vulgar people; even yet, he was almost wholly ignorant of
+the circumstances and conditions of her life. But how he saw her only in
+the enrapturing light of his daring for her sake, of a self-devotion
+that had seemed to make her his own; and he behaved toward her with a
+lover's self-forgetfulness,--or something like it: say a perfect
+tolerance, a tender patience, in which it would have been hard to detect
+the lurking shadow of condescension.
+
+He was fairly domesticated with the family. Mrs. Ellison's hurt, in
+spite of her many imprudences, was decidedly better, and sometimes she
+made a ceremony of being helped down from her room to dinner; but she
+always had tea beside her sofa, and he with the others drank it there.
+Few hours of the day passed in which they did not meet in that easy
+relation which establishes itself among people sojourning in summer
+idleness under the same roof. In the morning he saw the young girl fresh
+and glad as any flower of the garden beneath her window, while the sweet
+abstraction of her maiden dreams yet hovered in her eyes. At night he
+sat with her beside the lamp whose light, illuming a little world
+within, shut out the great world outside, and seemed to be the soft
+effulgence of her presence, as she sewed, or knit, or read,--a heavenly
+spirit of home. Sometimes he heard her talking with her cousin, or
+lightly laughing after he had said good night; once, when he woke, she
+seemed to be looking out of her window across the moonlight in the
+Ursulines' Garden while she sang a fragment of song. To meet her on the
+stairs or in the narrow entries; or to encounter her at the doors, and
+make way for her to pass with a jest and blush and flutter; to sit down
+at table with her three times a day,--was a potent witchery. There was a
+rapture in her shawl flung over the back of a chair; her gloves, lying
+light as fallen leaves on the table, and keeping the shape of her hands,
+were full of winning character; and all the more unaccountably they
+touched his heart because they had a certain careless, sweet shabbiness
+about the finger-tips.
+
+He found himself hanging upon her desultory talk with Fanny about the
+set of things and the agreement of colors. There was always more or less
+of this talk going on, whatever the main topic was, for continual
+question arose in the minds of one or other lady concerning those
+adaptations of Mrs. Ellison's finery to the exigencies of Kitty's daily
+life. They pleased their innocent hearts with the secrecy of the affair,
+which, in the concealments it required, the sudden difficulties it
+presented, and the guiltless equivocations it inspired, had the
+excitement of intrigue. Nothing could have been more to the mind of Mrs.
+Ellison than to deck Kitty for this perpetual masquerade; and, since the
+things were very pretty, and Kitty was a girl in every motion of her
+being, I do not see how anything could have delighted her more than to
+wear them. Their talk effervesced with the delicious consciousness that
+he could not dream of what was going on, and babbled over with
+mysterious jests and laughter, which sometimes he feared to be at his
+expense, and so joined in, and made them laugh the more at his
+misconception. He went and came among them at will; he had but to tap at
+Mrs. Ellison's door, and some voice of unaffected cordiality welcomed
+him in; he had but to ask, and Kitty was frankly ready for any of those
+strolls about Quebec in which most of their waking hours were dreamed
+away.
+
+The gray Lady of the North cast her spell about them,--the freshness of
+her mornings, the still heat of her middays, the slant, pensive radiance
+of her afternoons, and the pale splendor of her auroral nights. Never
+was city so faithfully explored; never did city so abound in objects of
+interest; for Kitty's love of the place was boundless, and his love for
+her was inevitable friendship with this adoptive patriotism.
+
+"I didn't suppose you Western people cared for these things," he once
+said; "I thought your minds were set on things new and square."
+
+"But how could you think so?" replied Kitty, tolerantly. "It's because
+we have so many new and square things that we like the old crooked ones.
+I do believe I should enjoy Europe even better than you. There's a
+forsaken farm-house near Eriecreek, dropping to pieces amongst its
+wild-grown sweetbriers and quince-bushes, that I used to think a wonder
+of antiquity because it was built in 1815. Can't you imagine how I must
+feel in a city like this, that was founded nearly three centuries ago,
+and has suffered so many sieges and captures, and looks like pictures of
+those beautiful old towns I can never see?"
+
+"O, perhaps you will see them some day!" he said, touched by her fervor.
+
+"I don't ask it at present: Quebec's enough. I'm in love with the place.
+I wish I never had to leave it. There isn't a crook, or a turn, or a
+tin-roof, or a dormer-window, or a gray stone in it that isn't
+precious."
+
+Mr. Arbuton laughed. "Well, you shall be sovereign lady of Quebec for
+me. Shall we have the English garrison turned out?"
+
+"No; not unless you can bring back Montcalm's men to take their places."
+
+This might be as they sauntered out of one of the city gates, and
+strayed through the Lower Town till they should chance upon some poor,
+bare-interiored church, with a few humble worshippers adoring their
+Saint, with his lamps alight before his picture; or as they passed some
+high convent-wall, and caught the strange, metallic clang of the nuns'
+voices singing their hymns within. Sometimes they whiled away the hours
+on the Esplanade, breathing its pensive sentiment of neglect and
+incipient decay, and pacing up and down over the turf athwart the slim
+shadows of the poplars; or, with comfortable indifference to the local
+observances, sat in talk on the carriage of one of the burly,
+uncared-for guns, while the spider wove his web across the mortar's
+mouth, and the grass nodded above the tumbled pyramids of shot, and the
+children raced up and down, and the nursery-maids were wooed of the
+dapper sergeants, and the red-coated sentry loitered lazily to and fro
+before his box. On the days of the music, they listened to the band in
+the Governor's Garden, and watched the fine world of the old capital in
+flirtation with the blond-whiskered officers; and on pleasant nights
+they mingled with the citizen throng that filled the Durham Terrace,
+while the river shaped itself in the lights of its shipping, and the
+Lower Town, with its lamps, lay, like a nether firmament, two hundred
+feet below them, and Point Levis glittered and sparkled on the thither
+shore, and in the northern sky the aurora throbbed in swift pulsations
+of violet and crimson. They liked to climb the Break-Neck Steps at
+Prescott Gate, dropping from the Upper to the Lower Town, which reminded
+Mr. Arbuton of Naples and Trieste, and took Kitty with the unassociated
+picturesqueness of their odd shops and taverns, and their lofty windows
+green with house-plants. They would stop and look up at the geraniums
+and fuchsias, and fall a thinking of far different things, and the
+friendly, unbusy people would come to their doors and look up with them.
+They recognized the handsome, blond young man, and the pretty, gray-eyed
+girl; for people in Quebec have time to note strangers who linger there,
+and Kitty and Mr. Arbuton had come to be well-known figures, different
+from the fleeting tourists on their rounds; and, indeed, as sojourners
+they themselves perceived their poetic distinction from mere birds of
+passage.
+
+Indoors they resorted much to the little entry-window looking out on the
+Ursulines' Garden. Two chairs stood confronted there, and it was hard
+for either of the young people to pass them without sinking a moment
+into one of them, and this appeared always to charm another presence
+into the opposite chair. There they often lingered in the soft
+forenoons, talking in desultory phrase of things far and near, or
+watching, in long silences, the nuns pacing up and down in the garden
+below, and waiting for the pensive, slender nun, and the stout, jolly
+nun whom Kitty had adopted, and whom she had gayly interpreted to him as
+an allegory of Life in their quaint inseparableness; and they played
+that the influence of one or other nun was in the ascendant, according
+as their own talk was gay or sad. In their relation, people are not so
+different from children; they like the same thing over and over again;
+they like it the better the less it is in itself.
+
+At times Kitty would come with a book in her hand (one finger shut in to
+keep the place),--some latest novel, or a pirated edition of Longfellow,
+recreantly purchased at a Quebec bookstore; and then Mr. Arbuton must
+ask to see it; and he read romance or poetry to her by the hour. He
+showed to as much advantage as most men do in the serious follies of
+wooing; and an influence which he could not defy, or would not, shaped
+him to all the sweet, absurd demands of the affair. From time to time,
+recollecting himself, and trying to look consequences in the face, he
+gently turned the talk upon Eriecreek, and endeavored to possess himself
+of some intelligible image of the place, and of Kitty's home and
+friends. Even then, the present was so fair and full of content, that
+his thoughts, when they reverted to the future, no longer met the
+obstacles that had made him recoil from it before. Whatever her past had
+been, he could find some way to weaken the ties that bound her to it; a
+year or two of Europe would leave no trace of Eriecreek; without effort
+of his, her life would adapt itself to his own, and cease to be a part
+of the lives of those people there; again and again his amiable
+imaginations--they were scarcely intents--accomplished themselves in
+many a swift, fugitive revery, while the days went by, and the shadow of
+the ivy in the window at which they sat fell, in moonlight and sunlight,
+upon Kitty's cheeks, and the fuchsia kissed her hair with its purple and
+crimson blossom.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+MR. ARBUTON SPEAKS.
+
+
+Mrs. Ellison was almost well; she had already been shopping twice in the
+Rue Fabrique, and her recovery was now chiefly retarded by the
+dress-maker's delays in making up a silk too precious to be risked in
+the piece with the customs officers, at the frontier. Moreover, although
+the colonel was beginning to chafe, she was not loath to linger yet a
+few days for the sake of an affair to which her suffering had been a
+willing sacrifice. In return for her indefatigable self-devotion, Kitty
+had lately done very little. She ungratefully shrunk more and more from
+those confidences to which her cousin's speeches covertly invited; she
+openly resisted open attempts upon her knowledge of facts. If she was
+not prepared to confess everything to Fanny, it was perhaps because it
+was all so very little, or because a young girl has not, or ought not to
+have, a mind in certain matters, or else knows it not, till it is asked
+her by the one first authorized to learn it. The dream in which she
+lived was flattering and fair; and it wholly contented her imagination
+while it lulled her consciousness. It moved from phase to phase without
+the harshness of reality, and was apparently allied neither to the
+future nor to the past. She herself seemed to have no more fixity or
+responsibility in it than the heroine of a romance.
+
+As their last week in Quebec drew to its close, only two or three things
+remained for them to do, as tourists; and chief among the few unvisited
+shrines of sentiment was the site of the old Jesuit mission at Sillery.
+
+"It won't do not to see that, Kitty," said Mrs. Ellison, who, as usual,
+had arranged the details of the excursion, and now announced them. "It's
+one of the principal things here, and your Uncle Jack would never be
+satisfied if you missed it. In fact, it's a shame to have left it so
+long. I can't go with you, for I'm saving up my strength for our picnic
+at Chateau-Bigot to-morrow; and I want you, Kitty, to see that the
+colonel sees everything. I've had trouble enough, goodness knows,
+getting the facts together for him." This was as Kitty and Mr. Arbuton
+sat waiting in Mrs. Ellison's parlor for the delinquent colonel, who had
+just stepped round to the Hotel St. Louis and was to be back presently.
+But the moment of his return passed; a quarter-hour of grace; a
+half-hour of grim magnanimity,--and still no colonel. Mrs. Ellison began
+by saying that it was perfectly abominable, and left herself, in a
+greater extremity, with nothing more forcible to add than that it was
+too provoking. "It's getting so late now," she said at last, "that it's
+no use waiting any longer, if you mean to go at all, to-day; and to-day's
+the only day you _can_ go. There, you'd better drive on without him. I
+can't bear to have you miss it." And, thus adjured, the younger people
+rose and went.
+
+When the high-born Noel Brulart de Sillery, Knight of Malta and courtier
+of Marie de Medicis, turned from the vanities of this world and became a
+priest, Canada was the fashionable mission of the day, and the noble
+neophyte signalized his self-renunciation by giving of his great wealth
+for the conversion of the Indian heathen. He supplied the Jesuits with
+money to maintain a religious establishment near Quebec; and the
+settlement of red Christians took his musical name, which the region
+still keeps. It became famous at once as the first residence of the
+Jesuits and the nuns of the Hotel Dieu, who wrought and suffered for
+religion there amidst the terrors of pestilence, Iroquois, and winter.
+It was the scene of miracles and martyrdoms, and marvels of many kinds,
+and the centre of the missionary efforts among the Indians. Indeed, few
+events of the picturesque early history of Quebec left it untouched; and
+it is worthy to be seen, no less for the wild beauty of the spot than
+for its heroical memories. About a league from the city, where the
+irregular wall of rock on which Quebec is built recedes from the river,
+and a grassy space stretches between the tide and the foot of the woody
+steep, the old mission and the Indian village once stood; and to this
+day there yet stands the stalwart frame of the first Jesuit Residence,
+modernized, of course, and turned to secular uses, but firm as of old,
+and good for a century to come. All round is a world of lumber, and
+rafts of vast extent cover the face of the waters in the ample
+cove,--one of many that indent the shore of the St. Lawrence. A careless
+village straggles along the roadside and the river's margin; huge
+lumber-ships are loading for Europe in the stream; a town shines out of
+the woods on the opposite shore; nothing but a friendly climate is
+needed to make this one of the most charming scenes the heart could
+imagine.
+
+Kitty and Mr. Arbuton drove out towards Sillery by the St. Louis Road,
+and already the jealous foliage that hides the pretty villas and stately
+places of that aristocratic suburb was tinged in here and there a bough
+with autumnal crimson or yellow; in the meadows here and there a vine
+ran red along the grass; the loath choke-cherries were ripening in the
+fence corners; the air was full of the pensive jargoning of the crickets
+and grasshoppers, and all the subtle sentiment of the fading summer.
+Their hearts were open to every dreamy influence of the time; their
+driver understood hardly any English, and their talk might safely be
+made up of those harmless egotisms which young people exchange,--those
+strains of psychological autobiography which mark advancing intimacy and
+in which they appear to each other the most uncommon persons that ever
+lived, and their experiences and emotions and ideas are the more
+surprisingly unique because exactly alike.
+
+It seemed a very short league to Sillery when they left the St. Louis
+Road, and the driver turned his horses' heads towards the river, down
+the winding sylvan way that descended to the shore; and they had not so
+much desire, after all, to explore the site of the old mission.
+Nevertheless, they got out and visited the little space once occupied by
+the Jesuit chapel, where its foundations may yet be traced in the grass,
+and they read the inscription on the monument lately raised by the
+parish to the memory of the first Jesuit missionary to Canada, who died
+at Sillery. Then there seemed nothing more to do but admire the mighty
+rafts and piles of lumber; but their show of interest in the local
+celebrity had stirred the pride of Sillery, and a little French boy
+entered the chapel-yard, and gave Kitty a pamphlet history of the place,
+for which he would not suffer himself to be paid; and a sweet-faced
+young Englishwoman came out of the house across the way, and
+hesitatingly asked if they would not like to see the Jesuit Residence.
+She led them indoors, and showed them how the ancient edifice had been
+encased by the modern house, and bade them note, from the deep shelving
+window-seats, that the stone walls were three feet thick. The rooms were
+low-ceiled and quaintly shaped, but they borrowed a certain grandeur
+from this massiveness; and it was easy to figure the priests in black
+and the nuns in gray in those dim chambers, which now a life so
+different inhabited. Behind the house was a plot of grass, and thence
+the wooded hill rose steep.
+
+"But come up stairs," said the ardent little hostess to Kitty, when her
+husband came in, and had civilly welcomed the strangers, "and I'll show
+you my own room, that's as old as any."
+
+They left the two men below, and mounted to a large room carpeted and
+furnished in modern taste. "We had to take down the old staircase," she
+continued, "to get our bedstead up,"--a magnificent structure which she
+plainly thought well worth the sacrifice; and then she pointed out
+divers remnants of the ancient building. "It's a queer place to live in;
+but we're only here for the summer"; and she went on to explain, with a
+pretty _naivete_, how her husband's business brought him to Sillery from
+Quebec in that season. They were descending the stairs, Kitty foremost,
+as she added, "This is my first housekeeping, you know, and of course it
+would be strange anywhere; but you can't think how funny it is here. I
+suppose," she said, shyly, but as if her confidences merited some
+return, while Kitty stepped from the stairway face to face with Mr.
+Arbuton, who was about to follow them, with the lady's husband,--"I
+suppose this is your wedding-journey."
+
+A quick alarm flamed through the young girl, and burned out of her
+glowing cheeks. This pleasant masquerade of hers must look to others
+like the most intentional love-making between her and Mr. Arbuton,--no
+dreams either of them, nor figures in a play, nor characters in a
+romance; nay, on one spectator, at least, it had shed the soft lustre of
+a honeymoon. How could it be otherwise? Here on this fatal line of
+wedding-travel,--so common that she remembered Mrs. March half
+apologized for making it her first tour after marriage,--how could it
+happen but that two young people together as they were should be taken
+for bride and bridegroom? Moreover, and worst of all, he must have heard
+that fatal speech!
+
+He was pale, if she was flushed, and looked grave, as she fancied; but
+he passed on up the stairs, and she sat down to wait for his return.
+
+"I used to notice so many couples from the States when we lived in the
+city," continued the hospitable mistress of the house, "but I don't
+think they often came out to Sillery. In fact, you're the only pair
+that's come this summer; and so, when you seemed interested about the
+mission, I thought you wouldn't mind if I spoke to you, and asked you in
+to see the house. Most of the Americans stay long enough to visit the
+citadel, and the Plains of Abraham, and the Falls at Montmorenci, and
+then they go away. I should think they'd be tired always doing the same
+things. To be sure, they're always different people."
+
+It was unfair to let her entertainer go on talking for quantity in this
+way; and Kitty said how glad she was to see the old Residence, and that
+she should always be grateful to her for asking them in. She did not
+disabuse her of her error; it cost less to leave it alone; and when Mr.
+Arbuton reappeared, she took leave of those kind people with a sort of
+remote enjoyment of the wife's mistakenness concerning herself. Yet, as
+the young matron and her husband stood beside the carriage repeating
+their adieux, she would fain have prolonged the parting forever, so much
+she dreaded to be left alone with Mr. Arbuton. But, left alone with him,
+her spirits violently rose; and as they drove along under the shadow of
+the cliff, she descanted in her liveliest strain upon the various
+interests of the way; she dwelt on the beauty of the wide, still river,
+with the ships at anchor in it; she praised the lovely sunset-light on
+the other shore; she commented lightly on the village, through which
+they passed, with the open doors and the suppers frying on the great
+stoves set into the partition-walls of each cleanly home; she made him
+look at the two great stairways that climb the cliff from the
+lumber-yards to the Plains of Abraham, and the army of laborers, each
+with his empty dinner-pail in hand, scaling the once difficult heights
+on their way home to the suburb of St. Roch; she did whatever she could
+to keep the talk to herself and yet away from herself. Part of the way
+the village was French and neat and pleasant, then it grovelled with
+Irish people, and ceased to be a tolerable theme for discourse; and so
+at last the silence against which she had battled fell upon them and
+deepened like a spell that she could not break.
+
+It would have been better for Mr. Arbuton's success just then if he had
+not broken it. But failure was not within his reckoning; for he had so
+long regarded this young girl _de haut en bas_, to say it brutally, that
+he could not imagine she should feel any doubt in accepting him.
+Moreover, a magnanimous sense of obligation mingled with his confident
+love, for she must have known that he had overheard that speech at the
+Residence. Perhaps he let this feeling color his manner, however
+faintly. He lacked the last fine instinct; he could not forbear; and he
+spoke while all her nerves and fluttering pulses cried him mercy.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+KITTY ANSWERS.
+
+
+It was dimmest twilight when Kitty entered Mrs. Ellison's room and sank
+down on the first chair in silence.
+
+"The colonel met a friend at the St. Louis, and forgot about the
+expedition, Kitty," said Fanny, "and he only came in half an hour ago.
+But it's just as well; I know you've had a splendid time. Where's Mr.
+Arbuton?"
+
+Kitty burst into tears.
+
+"Why, has anything happened to him?" cried Mrs. Ellison, springing
+towards her.
+
+"To him? No! What should happen to _him_?" Kitty demanded with an
+indignant accent.
+
+"Well, then, has anything happened to _you_?"
+
+"I don't know if you can call it _happening_. But I suppose you'll be
+satisfied now, Fanny. He's offered himself to me." Kitty uttered the
+last words with a sort of violence, as if since the fact must be stated,
+she wished it to appear in the sharpest relief.
+
+"O dear!" said Mrs. Ellison, not so well satisfied as the successful
+match-maker ought to be. So long as it was a marriage in the abstract,
+she had never ceased to desire it; but as the actual union of Kitty and
+this Mr. Arbuton, of whom, really, they knew so little, and of whom, if
+she searched her heart, she had as little liking as knowledge, it was
+another affair. Mrs. Ellison trembled at her triumph, and began to think
+that failure would have been easier to bear. Were they in the least
+suited to each other? Would she like to see poor Kitty chained for life
+to that impassive egotist, whose very merits were repellent, and whose
+modesty even seemed to convict and snub you? Mrs. Ellison was not able
+to put the matter to herself with moderation, either way; doubtless she
+did Mr. Arbuton injustice now. "Did you accept him?" she whispered,
+feebly.
+
+"Accept him?" repeated Kitty. "No!"
+
+"O dear!" again sighed Mrs. Ellison, feeling that this was scarcely
+better, and not daring to ask further.
+
+"I'm dreadfully perplexed, Fanny," said Kitty, after waiting for the
+questions which did not come, "and I wish you'd help me think."
+
+"I will, darling. But I don't know that I'll be of much use. I begin to
+think I'm not very good at thinking."
+
+Kitty, who longed chiefly to get the situation more distinctly before
+herself, gave no heed to this confession, but went on to rehearse the
+whole affair. The twilight lent her its veil; and in the kindly
+obscurity she gathered courage to face all the facts, and even to find
+what was droll in them.
+
+"It was very solemn, of course, and I was frightened; but I tried to
+keep my wits about me, and _not_ to say yes, simply because that was the
+easiest thing. I told him that I didn't know,--and I don't; and that I
+must have time to think,--and I must. He was very ungenerous, and said
+he had hoped I had already had time to think; and he couldn't seem to
+understand, or else I couldn't very well explain, how it had been with
+me all along."
+
+"He might certainly say you had encouraged him," Mrs. Ellison remarked,
+thoughtfully.
+
+"Encouraged him, Fanny? How can you accuse me of such indelicacy?"
+
+"Encouraging isn't indelicacy. The gentlemen _have_ to be encouraged, or
+of course they'd never have any courage. They're so timid, naturally."
+
+"I don't think Mr. Arbuton is very timid. He seemed to think that he had
+only to ask as a matter of form, and I had no business to say anything.
+What has he ever done for me? And hasn't he often been intensely
+disagreeable? He oughtn't to have spoken just after overhearing what he
+did. It was horrid to do so. He was very obtuse, too, not to see that
+girls can't always be so certain of themselves as men, or, if they are,
+don't know they are as soon as they're asked."
+
+"Yes," interrupted Mrs. Ellison, "that's the way with girls. I do
+believe that most of them--when they're young like you, Kitty--never
+think of marriage as the end of their flirtations. They'd just like the
+attentions and the romance to go on forever, and never turn into
+anything more serious; and they're not to blame for that, though they
+_do_ get blamed for it."
+
+"Certainly," assented Kitty, eagerly, "that's it; that's just what I was
+saying; that's the very reason why girls must have time to make up their
+minds. _You_ had, I suppose."
+
+"Yes, two minutes. Poor Dick was going back to his regiment, and stood
+with his watch in his hand. I said no, and called after him to correct
+myself. But, Kitty, if the romance had happened to stop without his
+saying anything, you wouldn't have liked that either, would you?"
+
+"No," faltered Kitty, "I suppose not."
+
+"Well, then, don't you see? That's a great point in his favor. How much
+time did you want, or did he give you?"
+
+"I said I should answer before we left Quebec," answered Kitty, with a
+heavy sigh.
+
+"Don't you know what to say now?"
+
+"I can't tell. That's what I want you to help me think out."
+
+Mrs. Ellison was silent for a moment before she said, "Well, then, I
+suppose we shall have to go back to the very beginning."
+
+"Yes," assented Kitty, faintly.
+
+"You did have a sort of fancy for him the first time you saw him, didn't
+you?" asked Mrs. Ellison, coaxingly, while forcing herself to be
+systematic and coherent, by a mental strain of which no idea can be
+given.
+
+"Yes," said Kitty, yet more faintly, adding, "but I can't tell just what
+sort of a fancy it was. I suppose I admired him for being handsome and
+stylish, and for having such exquisite manners."
+
+"Go on," said Mrs. Ellison. "And after you got acquainted with him?"
+
+"Why, you know we've talked that over once already, Fanny."
+
+"Yes, but we oughtn't to skip anything now," replied Mrs. Ellison, in a
+tone of judicial accuracy which made Kitty smile.
+
+But she quickly became serious again, and said, "Afterwards I couldn't
+tell whether to like him or not, or whether he wanted me to. I think he
+acted very strangely for a person in--love. I used to feel so troubled
+and oppressed when I was with him. He seemed always to be making himself
+agreeable under protest."
+
+"Perhaps that was just your imagination, Kitty."
+
+"Perhaps it was; but it troubled me just the same."
+
+"Well, and then?"
+
+"Well, and then after that day of the Montgomery expedition, he seemed
+to change altogether, and to try always to be pleasant, and to do
+everything he could to make me like him. I don't know how to account for
+it. Ever since then he's been extremely careful of me, and behaved--of
+course without knowing it--as if I belonged to him already. Or maybe
+I've imagined that too. It's very hard to tell what has really happened
+the last two weeks."
+
+Kitty was silent, and Mrs. Ellison did not speak at once. Presently she
+asked, "Was his acting as if you belonged to him disagreeable?"
+
+"I can't tell. I think it was rather presuming. I don't know why he did
+it."
+
+"Do you respect him?" demanded Mrs. Ellison.
+
+"Why, Fanny, I've always told you that I did respect some things in
+him."
+
+Mrs. Ellison had the facts before her, and it rested upon her to sum
+them up, and do something with them. She rose to a sitting posture, and
+confronted her task.
+
+"Well, Kitty, I'll tell you: I don't really know what to think. But I
+can say this: if you liked him at first, and then didn't like him, and
+afterwards he made himself more agreeable, and you didn't mind his
+behaving as if you belonged to him, and you respected him, but after all
+didn't think him fascinating--"
+
+"He _is_ fascinating--in a kind of way. He was, from the beginning. In a
+story his cold, snubbing, putting-down ways would have been perfectly
+fascinating."
+
+"Then why didn't you take him?"
+
+"Because," answered Kitty, between laughing and crying, "it isn't a
+story, and I don't know whether I like him."
+
+"But do you think you might get to like him?"
+
+"I don't know. His asking brings back all the doubts I ever had of him,
+and that I've been forgetting the past two weeks. I can't tell whether I
+like him or not. If I did, shouldn't I trust him more?"
+
+"Well, whether you are in love or not, I'll tell you what you _are_,
+Kitty," cried Mrs. Ellison, provoked with her indecision, and yet
+relieved that the worst, whatever it was, was postponed thereby for a
+day or two.
+
+"What!"
+
+"You're--"
+
+But at this important juncture the colonel came lounging in, and Kitty
+glided out of the room.
+
+"Richard," said Mrs. Ellison, seriously, and in a tone implying that it
+was the colonel's fault, as usual, "you know what has happened, I
+suppose."
+
+"No, my dear, I don't; but no matter: I will presently, I dare say."
+
+"O, I wish for once you wouldn't be so flippant. Mr. Arbuton has offered
+himself to Kitty."
+
+Colonel Ellison gave a quick, sharp whistle of amazement, but trusted
+himself to nothing more articulate.
+
+"Yes," said his wife, responding to the whistle, "and it makes me
+perfectly wretched."
+
+"Why, I thought you liked him."
+
+"I didn't _like_ him; but I thought it would be an excellent thing for
+Kitty."
+
+"And won't it?"
+
+"She doesn't know."
+
+"Doesn't know?"
+
+"No."
+
+The colonel was silent, while Mrs. Ellison stated the case in full, and
+its pending uncertainty. Then he exclaimed vehemently, as if his
+amazement had been growing upon him, "This is the most astonishing thing
+in the world! Who would ever have dreamt of that young iceberg being in
+love?"
+
+"Haven't I _told_ you all along he was?"
+
+"O yes, certainly; but that might be taken either way, you know. You
+would discover the tender passion in the eye of a potato."
+
+"Colonel Ellison," said Fanny with sternness, "why do you suppose he's
+been hanging about us for the last four weeks? Why should he have stayed
+in Quebec? Do you think he pitied _me_, or found _you_ so very
+agreeable?"
+
+"Well, I thought he found us just tolerable, and was interested in the
+place."
+
+Mrs. Ellison made no direct reply to this pitiable speech, but looked a
+scorn which, happily for the colonel, the darkness hid. Presently she
+said that bats did not express the blindness of men, for any bat could
+have seen what was going on.
+
+"Why," remarked the colonel, "I did have a momentary suspicion that day
+of the Montgomery business; they both looked very confused, when I saw
+them at the end of that street, and neither of them had anything to say;
+but that was accounted for by what you told me afterwards about his
+adventure. At the time I didn't pay much attention to the matter. The
+idea of his being in love seemed too ridiculous."
+
+"Was it ridiculous for you to be in love with me?"
+
+"No; and yet I can't praise my condition for its wisdom, Fanny."
+
+"Yes! that's _like_ men. As soon as one of them is safely married, he
+thinks all the love-making in the world has been done forever, and he
+can't conceive of two young people taking a fancy to each other."
+
+"That's something so, Fanny. But granting--for the sake of argument
+merely--that Boston has been asking Kitty to marry him, and she doesn't
+know whether she wants him, what are we to do about it? _I_ don't like
+him well enough to plead his cause; do you? When does Kitty think she'll
+be able to make up her mind?"
+
+"She's to let him know before we leave."
+
+The colonel laughed. "And so he's to hang about here on uncertainties
+for two whole days! That _is_ rather rough on him. Fanny, what made you
+so eager for this business?"
+
+"Eager? I _wasn't_ eager."
+
+"Well, then,--reluctantly acquiescent?"
+
+"Why, she's so literary and that."
+
+"And what?"
+
+"How insulting!--Intellectual, and so on; and I thought she would be
+just fit to live in a place where everybody is literary and
+intellectual. That is, I thought that, if I thought anything."
+
+"Well," said the colonel, "you may have been right on the whole, but I
+don't think Kitty is showing any particular force of mind, just now,
+that would fit her to live in Boston. My opinion is, that it's
+ridiculous for her to keep him in suspense. She might as well answer him
+first as last. She's putting herself under a kind of obligation by her
+delay. I'll talk to her--"
+
+"If you do, you'll kill her. You don't know how she's wrought up about
+it."
+
+"O well, I'll be careful of her sensibilities. It's my duty to speak
+with her. I'm here in the place of a parent. Besides, don't I know
+Kitty? I've almost brought her up."
+
+"Maybe you're right. You're all so queer that perhaps you're right.
+Only, do be careful, Richard. You must approach the matter very
+delicately,--indirectly, you know. Girls are different, remember, from
+young men, and you mustn't be blunt. Do maneuver a little, for once in
+your life."
+
+"All right, Fanny; you needn't be afraid of my doing anything awkward or
+sudden. I'll go to her room pretty soon, after she is quieted down, and
+have a good, calm old fatherly conversation with her."
+
+The colonel was spared this errand; for Kitty had left some of her
+things on Fanny's table, and now came back for them with a lamp in her
+hand. Her averted face showed the marks of weeping; the corners of her
+firm-set lips were downward bent, as if some resolution which she had
+taken were very painful. This the anxious Fanny saw; and she made a
+gesture to the colonel which any woman would have understood to enjoin
+silence, or, at least, the utmost caution and tenderness of speech. The
+colonel summoned his _finesse_ and said, cheerily, "Well, Kitty, what's
+Boston been saying to you?"
+
+Mrs. Ellison fell back upon her sofa as if shot, and placed her hand
+over her face.
+
+Kitty seemed not to hear her cousin. Having gathered up her things, she
+bent an unmoved face and an unseeing gaze full upon him, and glided from
+the room without a word.
+
+"Well, upon my soul," cried the colonel, "this is a pleasant,
+nightmarish, sleep-walking, Lady-Macbethish little transaction. Confound
+it, Fanny this comes of your wanting me to maneuver. If you'd let me
+come straight _at_ the subject,--like a _man_--"
+
+"_Please_, Richard, don't say anything more now," pleaded Mrs. Ellison
+in a broken voice. "You can't help it, I know; and I must do the best I
+can, under the circumstances. Do go away for a little while, darling! O
+dear!"
+
+As for Kitty, when she had got out of the room in that phantasmal
+fashion, she dimly recalled, through the mists of her own trouble, the
+colonel's dismay at her so glooming upon him, and began to think that
+she had used poor Dick more tragically than she need, and so began to
+laugh softly to herself; but while she stood there at the entry window a
+moment, laughing in the moonlight, that made her lamp-flame thin, and
+painted her face with its pale lustre, Mr. Arbuton came down the attic
+stairway. He was not a man of quick fancies; but to one of even slower
+imagination and of calmer mood, she might very well have seemed unreal,
+the creature of a dream, fantastic, intangible, insensible, arch, not
+wholly without some touch of the malign. In his heart he groaned over
+her beauty as if she were lost to him forever in this elfish
+transfiguration.
+
+"Miss Ellison!" he scarcely more than whispered.
+
+"You ought not to speak to me now," she answered, gravely.
+
+"I know it; but I could not help it. For heaven's sake, do not let it
+tell against me. I wished to ask if I should not see you to-morrow; to
+beg that all might go on as had been planned, and as if nothing had been
+said to-day."
+
+"It'll be very strange," said Kitty. "My cousins know everything now.
+How can we meet before them!"
+
+"I'm not going away without an answer, and we can't remain here without
+meeting. It will be less strange if we let everything take its course."
+
+"Well."
+
+"Thanks."
+
+He looked strangely humbled, but even more bewildered than humbled.
+
+She listened while he descended the steps, unbolted the street door, and
+closed it behind him. Then she passed out of the moonlight into her own
+room, whose close-curtained space the lamp filled with its ruddy glow,
+and revealed her again, no malicious sprite, but a very puzzled,
+conscientious, anxious young girl.
+
+Of one thing, at least, she was clear. It had all come about through
+misunderstanding, through his taking her to be something that she was
+not; for she was certain that Mr. Arbuton was of too worldly a spirit to
+choose, if he had known, a girl of such origin and lot as she was only
+too proud to own. The deception must have begun with dress; and she
+determined that her first stroke for truth and sincerity should be most
+sublimely made in the return of Fanny's things, and a rigid fidelity to
+her own dresses. "Besides," she could not help reflecting, "my
+travelling-suit will be just the thing for a picnic." And here, if the
+cynical reader of another sex is disposed to sneer at the method of her
+self-devotion, I am sure that women, at least, will allow it was most
+natural and highly proper that in this great moment she should first
+think of dress, upon which so great consequences hang in matters of the
+heart Who--to be honest for once, O vain and conceited men!--can deny
+that the cut, the color, the texture, the stylish set of dresses, has
+not had everything to do with the rapture of love's young dream? Are not
+certain bits of lace and knots of ribbon as much a part of it as any
+smile or sidelong glance of them all? And hath not the long experience
+of the fair taught them that artful dress is half the virtue of their
+spells? Full well they know it; and when Kitty resolved to profit no
+longer by Fanny's wardrobe, she had won the hardest part of the battle
+in behalf of perfect truth towards Mr. Arbuton. She did not, indeed,
+stop with this, but lay awake, devising schemes by which she should
+disabuse him of his errors about her, and persuade him that she was no
+wife for him.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+THE PICNIC AT CHATEAU-BIGOT.
+
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Ellison, who had slipped into Kitty's room, in the
+morning, to do her back hair with some advantages of light which her own
+chamber lacked, "it'll be no crazier than the rest of the performance;
+and if you and he can stand it, I'm sure that _we_'ve no reason to
+complain."
+
+"Why, I don't see how it's to be helped, Fanny. He's asked it; and I'm
+rather glad he has, for I should have hated to have the conventional
+headache that keeps young ladies from being seen; and at any rate I
+don't understand how the day could be passed more sensibly than just as
+we originally planned to spend it. I can make up my mind a great deal
+better with him than away from him. But I think there never was a more
+ridiculous situation: now that the high tragedy has faded out of it, and
+the serious part is coming, it makes me laugh. Poor Mr. Arbuton will
+feel all day that he is under my mercilessly critical eye, and that he
+mustn't do this and he mustn't say that, for fear of me; and he can't
+run away, for he's promised to wait patiently for my decision. It's a
+most inglorious position for him, but I don't think of anything to do
+about it. I could say no at once, but he'd rather not."
+
+"What have you got that dress on for?" asked Mrs. Ellison, abruptly.
+
+"Because I'm not going to wear your things any more, Fanny. It's a case
+of conscience. I feel like a guilty creature, being courted in another's
+clothes; and I don't know but it's for a kind of punishment of my deceit
+that I can't realize this affair as I ought, or my part in it. I keep
+feeling, the whole time, as if it were somebody else, and I have an
+absurd kind of other person's interest in it."
+
+Mrs. Ellison essayed some reply, but was met by Kitty's steadfast
+resolution, and in the end did not prevail in so much as a ribbon for
+her hair.
+
+It was not till well into the forenoon that the preparations for the
+picnic were complete and the four set off together in one carriage. In
+the strong need that was on each of them to make the best of the affair,
+the colonel's unconsciousness might have been a little overdone, but
+Mrs. Ellison's demeanor was sublimely successful. The situation gave
+full play to her peculiar genius, and you could not have said that any
+act of hers failed to contribute to the perfection of her design, that
+any tone or speech was too highly colored. Mr. Arbuton, of whom she took
+possession, and who knew that she knew all, felt that he had never done
+justice to her, and seconded her efforts with something like cordial
+admiration; while Kitty, with certain grateful looks and aversions of
+the face, paid an ardent homage to her strokes of tact, and after a few
+miserable moments, in which her nightlong trouble gnawed at her heart,
+began, in spite of herself, to enjoy the humor of the situation.
+
+It is a lovely road out to Chateau-Bigot. First you drive through the
+ancient suburbs of the Lower Town, and then you mount the smooth, hard
+highway, between pretty country-houses, toward the village of
+Charlesbourg, while Quebec shows, to your casual backward-glance, like a
+wondrous painted scene, with the spires and lofty roofs of the Upper
+Town, and the long, irregular wall wandering on the verge of the cliff;
+then the thronging gables and chimneys of St. Roch, and again many
+spires and convent walls; lastly the shipping in the St. Charles, which,
+in one direction, runs, a narrowing gleam, up into its valley, and in
+the other widens into the broad light of the St. Lawrence. Quiet, elmy
+spaces of meadow land stretch between the suburban mansions and the
+village of Charlesbourg, where the driver reassured himself as to his
+route from the group of idlers on the platform before the church. Then
+he struck off on a country road, and presently turned from this again
+into a lane that grew rougher and rougher, till at last it lapsed to a
+mere cart-track among the woods, where the rich, strong odors of the
+pine, and of the wild herbs bruised under the wheels, filled the air. A
+peasant and his black-eyed, open-mouthed boy were cutting withes to bind
+hay at the side of the track, and the latter consented to show the
+strangers to the chateau from a point beyond which they could not go
+with the carriage. There the small habitant and the driver took up the
+picnic-baskets, and led the way through pathless growths of underbrush
+to a stream, so swift that it is said never to freeze, so deeply sprung
+that the summer never drinks it dry. A screen of water-growths bordered
+it; and when this was passed, a wide open space revealed itself, with
+the ruin of the chateau in the midst.
+
+The pathos of long neglect lay upon the scene; for here were evidences
+of gardens and bowery aisles in other times, and now, for many a year,
+desolation and the slow return of the wilderness. The mountain rising
+behind the chateau grounds showed the dying flush of the deciduous
+leaves among the dark green of the pines that clothed it to the crest; a
+cry of innumerable crickets filled the ear of the dreaming noon.
+
+The ruin itself is not of impressive size, and it is a chateau by grace
+of the popular fancy rather than through any right of its own; for it
+was, in truth, never more than the hunting-lodge of the king's
+Intendant, Bigot, a man whose sins claim for him a lordly consideration
+in the history of Quebec, He was the last Intendant before the British
+conquest, and in that time of general distress he grew rich by
+oppression of the citizens, and by peculation from the soldiers. He
+built this pleasure-house here in the woods, and hither he rode out from
+Quebec to enjoy himself in the chase and the carouses that succeed the
+chase. Here, too, it is said, dwelt in secret the Huron girl who loved
+him, and who survives in the memory of the peasants as the murdered
+_sauragesse_; and, indeed, there is as much proof that she was murdered
+as that she ever lived. When the wicked Bigot was arrested and sent to
+France, where he was tried with great result of documentary record, his
+chateau fell into other hands; at last a party of Arnold's men wintered
+there in 1775, and it is to our own countrymen that we owe the
+conflagration and the ruin of Chateau-Bigot. It stands, as I said, in
+the middle of that open place, with the two gable walls and the stone
+partition-wall still almost entire, and that day showing very
+effectively against the tender northern sky. On the most weatherward
+gable the iron in the stone had shed a dark red stain under the lash of
+many winter storms, and some tough lichens had incrusted patches of the
+surface; but, for the rest, the walls rose in the univied nakedness of
+all ruins in our climate, which has no clinging evergreens wherewith to
+pity and soften the forlornness of decay. Out of the rubbish at the foot
+of the walls there sprang a wilding growth of syringas and lilacs; and
+the interior was choked with flourishing weeds, and with the briers of
+the raspberry, on which a few berries hung. The heavy beams, left where
+they fell a hundred years ago, proclaimed the honest solidity with which
+the chateau had been built, and there was proof in the cut stone of the
+hearths and chimney-places that it had once had at least the ambition of
+luxury.
+
+While its visitors stood amidst the ruin, a harmless garden-snake
+slipped out of one crevice into another; from her nest in some hidden
+corner overhead a silent bird flew away. For the moment,--so slight is
+the capacity of any mood, so deeply is the heart responsive to a little
+impulse,--the palace of the Caesars could not have imparted a keener
+sense of loss and desolation. They eagerly sought such particulars of
+the ruin as agreed with the descriptions they had read of it, and were
+as well contented with a bit of cellar-way outside as if they had really
+found the secret passage to the subterranean chamber of the chateau, or
+the hoard of silver which the little habitant said was buried under it.
+Then they dispersed about the grounds to trace out the borders of the
+garden, and Mr. Arbuton won the common praise by discovering the
+foundations of the stable of the chateau.
+
+Then there was no more to do but to prepare for the picnic. They chose a
+grassy plot in the shadow of a half-dismantled bark-lodge,--a relic of
+the Indians, who resort to the place every summer. In the ashes of that
+sylvan hearth they kindled their fire, Mr. Arbuton gathering the sticks,
+and the colonel showing a peculiar genius in adapting the savage flames
+to the limitations of the civilized coffee-pot borrowed of Mrs. Gray.
+Mrs. Ellison laid the cloth, much meditating the arrangement of the
+viands, and reversing again and again the relative positions of the
+sliced tongue and the sardines that flanked the cold roast chicken, and
+doubting dreadfully whether to put down the cake and the canned peaches
+at once, or reserve them for a second course; the stuffed olives drove
+her to despair, being in a bottle, and refusing to be balanced by
+anything less monumental in shape. Some wild asters and red leaves and
+green and yellowing sprays of fern which Kitty arranged in a tumbler
+were hailed with rapture, but presently flung far away with fierce
+disdain because they had ants on them. Kitty witnessed this outburst
+with her usual complacency, and then went on making the coffee. With
+such blissful pain as none but lovers know, Mr. Arbuton saw her break
+the egg upon the edge of the coffee-pot, and let it drop therein, and
+then, with a charming frenzy, stir it round and round. It was a picture
+of domestic suggestion, a subtle insinuation of home, the unconscious
+appeal of inherent housewifery to inherent husbandhood. At the crash of
+the eggshell he trembled; the swift agitation of the coffee and the egg
+within the pot made him dizzy.
+
+"Sha'n't I stir that for you, Miss Ellison?" he said, awkwardly.
+
+"O dear, no!" she answered in surprise at a man's presuming to stir
+coffee; "but you may go get me some water at the creek, if you please."
+
+She gave him a pitcher, and he went off to the brook, which was but a
+minute's distance away. This minute, however, left her alone, for the
+first time that day, with both Dick and Fanny, and a silence fell upon
+all three at once. They could not help looking at one another; and then
+the colonel, to show that he was not thinking of anything, began to
+whistle, and Mrs. Ellison rebuked him for whistling.
+
+"Why not?" he asked. "It isn't a funeral, is it?"
+
+"Of course it isn't," said Mrs. Ellison; and Kitty, who had been
+blushing to the verge of tears, laughed instead, and then was consumed
+with vexation when Mr. Arbuton came up, feeling that he must suspect
+himself the motive of her ill-timed mirth. "The champagne ought to be
+cooled, I suppose," observed Mrs. Ellison, when the coffee had been
+finally stirred and set to boil on the coals.
+
+"I'm best acquainted with the brook," said Mr. Arbuton, "and I know just
+the eddy in it where the champagne will cool soonest."
+
+"Then you shall take it there," answered the governess of the feast; and
+Mr. Arbuton duteously set off with the bottle in his hand.
+
+The pitcher of water which he had already brought stood in the grass; by
+a sudden movement of the skirt, Kitty knocked it over. The colonel made
+a start forward; Mrs. Ellison arrested him with a touch, while she bent
+a look of ineffable admiration upon Kitty.
+
+"Now, I'll teach myself," said Kitty, "that I can't be so clumsy with
+impunity. I'll go and fill that pitcher again myself." She hurried after
+Mr. Arbuton; they scarcely spoke going or coming; but the constraint
+that Kitty felt was nothing to that she had dreaded in seeking to escape
+from the tacit raillery of the colonel and the championship of Fanny.
+Yet she trembled to realize that already her life had become so far
+entangled with this stranger's, that she found refuge with him from her
+own kindred. They could do nothing to help her in this; the trouble was
+solely hers and his, and they two must get out of it one way or other
+themselves; the case scarcely admitted even of sympathy, and if it had
+not been hers, it would have been one to amuse her rather than appeal to
+her compassion. Even as it was, she sometimes caught herself smiling at
+the predicament of a young girl who had passed a month in every
+appearance of love-making, and who, being asked her heart, was holding
+her lover in suspense whilst she searched it, and meantime was
+picnicking with him upon the terms of casual flirtation. Of all the
+heroines in her books, she knew none in such a strait as this.
+
+But her perplexities did not impair the appetite which she brought to
+the sylvan feast. In her whole simple life she had never tasted
+champagne before, and she said innocently, as she put the frisking fluid
+from her lips after the first taste, "Why, I thought you had to _learn_
+to like champagne."
+
+"No," remarked the colonel, "it's like reading and writing: it comes by
+nature. I suppose that even one of the lower animals would like
+champagne. The refined instinct of young ladies makes them recognize its
+merits instantly. Some of the Confederate cellars," added the colonel,
+thoughtfully, "had very good champagne in them. Green seal was the
+favorite of our erring brethren. It wasn't one of their errors. I prefer
+it myself to our own native cider, whether made of apples or grapes.
+Yes, it's better even than the water from the old chain-pump in the back
+yard at Eriecreek, though it hasn't so fine a flavor of lubricating oil
+in it."
+
+The faint chill that touched Mr. Arbuton at the mention of Eriecreek and
+its petrolic associations was transient. He was very light of heart,
+since the advance that Kitty seemed to have made him; and in his
+temporary abandon he talked well, and promoted the pleasure of the time
+without critical reserves. When the colonel, with the reluctance of our
+soldiers to speak of their warlike experiences before civilians, had
+suffered himself to tell a story that his wife begged of him about his
+last battle, Mr. Arbuton listened with a deference that flattered poor
+Mrs. Ellison, and made her marvel at Kitty's doubt concerning him; and
+then he spoke entertainingly of some travel experiences of his own,
+which he politely excused as quite unworthy to come after the colonel's
+story. He excused them a little too much, and just gave the modest
+soldier a faint, uneasy fear of having boasted. But no one else felt
+this result of his delicacy, and the feast was merry enough. When it was
+ended, Mrs. Ellison, being still a little infirm of foot, remained in
+the shadow of the bark-lodge, and the colonel lit his cigar, and loyally
+stretched himself upon the grass before her.
+
+There was nothing else for Kitty and Mr. Arbuton but to stroll off
+together, and she preferred to do this.
+
+They sauntered up to the chateau in silence, and peered somewhat
+languidly about the ruin. On a bit of smooth surface in a sheltered
+place many names of former visitors were written, and Mr. Arbuton said
+he supposed they might as well add those of their own party.
+
+"O yes," answered Kitty, with a half-sigh, seating herself upon a fallen
+stone, and letting her hands fall into each other in her lap as her wont
+was, "you write them." A curious pensiveness passed from one to the
+other and possessed them both.
+
+Mr. Arbuton began to write. Suddenly, "Miss Ellison," said he, with a
+smile, "I've blundered in your name; I neglected to put the Miss before
+it; and now there isn't room on the plastering."
+
+"O, never mind," replied Kitty, "I dare say it won't be missed!"
+
+Mr. Arbuton neither perceived nor heeded the pun. He was looking in a
+sort of rapture at the name which his own hand had written now for the
+first time, and he felt an indecorous desire to kiss it.
+
+"If I could speak it as I've written it--"
+
+"I don't see what harm there would be in that," said the owner of the
+name, "or what object," she added more discreetly.
+
+--"I should feel that I had made a great gain."
+
+"I never told you," answered Kitty, evasively, "how much I admire _your_
+first name, Mr. Arbuton."
+
+"How did you know it?"
+
+"It was on the card you gave my cousin," said Kitty, frankly, but
+thinking he now must know she had been keeping his card.
+
+"It's an old family name,--a sort of heirloom from the first of us who
+came to the country; and in every generation since, some Arbuton has had
+to wear it."
+
+"It's superb!" cried Kitty. "Miles! 'Miles Standish, the Puritan
+captain,' 'Miles Standish, the Captain of Plymouth.' I should be very
+proud of such a name."
+
+"You have only to take it," he said, gravely.
+
+"O, I didn't mean that," she said with a blush, and then added, "Yours
+is a very old family, then, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, it's pretty well," answered Mr. Arbuton, "but it's not such a rare
+thing in the East, you know."
+
+"I suppose not. The Ellisons are _not_ an old family. If we went back of
+my uncle, we should only come to backwoodsmen and Indian fighters.
+Perhaps that's the reason we don't care much for old families. You think
+a great deal of them in Boston, don't you?"
+
+"We do, and we don't. It's a long story, and I'm afraid I couldn't make
+you understand, unless you had seen something of Boston society."
+
+"Mr. Arbuton," said Kitty, abruptly plunging to the bottom of the
+subject on which they had been hovering, "I'm dreadfully afraid that
+what you said to me--what you asked of me, yesterday--was all through a
+misunderstanding. I'm afraid that you've somehow mistaken me and my
+circumstances, and that somehow I've innocently helped on your mistake."
+
+"There is no mistake," he answered, eagerly, "about my loving you!"
+
+Kitty did not look up, nor answer this outburst, which flattered while
+it pained her. She said, "I've been so much mistaken myself, and I've
+been so long finding it out, that I should feel anxious to have you know
+just what kind of girl you'd asked to be your wife, before I--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Nothing. But I should want you to know that in many things my life has
+been very, very different from yours. The first thing I can
+remember--you'll think I'm more autobiographical than our driver at
+Ha-Ha Bay, even, but I must tell you all this--is about Kansas, where we
+had moved from Illinois, and of our having hardly enough to eat or wear,
+and of my mother grieving over our privations. At last, when my father
+was killed," she said, dropping her voice, "in front of our own door--"
+
+Mr. Arbuton gave a start. "Killed?"
+
+"Yes; didn't you know? Or no: how could you? He was shot by the
+Missourians."
+
+Whether it was not hopelessly out of taste to have a father-in-law who
+had been shot by the Missourians? Whether he could persuade Kitty to
+suppress that part of her history? That she looked very pretty, sitting
+there, with her earnest eyes lifted toward his. These things flashed
+wilfully through Mr. Arbuton's mind.
+
+"My father was a Free-State man," continued Kitty, in a tone of pride.
+"He wasn't when he first went to Kansas," she added simply; while Mr.
+Arbuton groped among his recollections of that forgotten struggle for
+some association with these names, keenly feeling the squalor of it all,
+and thinking still how very pretty she was. "He went out there to
+publish a proslavery paper. But when he found out what the Border
+Ruffians really were, he turned against them. He used to be very bitter
+about my uncle's having become an Abolitionist; they had had a quarrel
+about it; but father wrote to him from Kansas, and they made it up; and
+before father died he was able to tell mother that we were to go to
+uncle's. But mother was sick then, and she only lived a month after
+father; and when my cousin came out to get us, just before she died,
+there was scarcely a crust of cornbread in our cabin. It seemed like
+heaven to get to Eriecreek; but even at Eriecreek we live in a way that
+I am afraid you wouldn't respect. My uncle has just enough, and we are
+very plain people indeed. I suppose," continued the young girl meekly,
+"that I haven't had at all what you'd call an education. Uncle told me
+what to read, at first, and after that I helped myself. It seemed to
+come naturally; but don't you see that it wasn't an education?"
+
+"I beg pardon," said Mr. Arbuton, with a blush; for he had just then
+lost the sense of what she said in the music of her voice, as it
+hesitated over these particulars of her history.
+
+"I mean," explained Kitty, "that I'm afraid I must be very one-sided.
+I'm dreadfully ignorant of a great many things. I haven't any
+accomplishments, only the little bit of singing and playing that you've
+heard; I couldn't tell a good picture from a bad one; I've never been to
+the opera; I don't know anything about society. Now just imagine," cried
+Kitty, with sublime impartiality, "such a girl as that in Boston!"
+
+Even Mr. Arbuton could not help smiling at this comic earnestness, while
+she resumed: "At home my cousins and I do all kinds of things that the
+ladies whom you know have done for them. We do our own work, for one
+thing," she continued, with a sudden treacherous misgiving that what she
+was saying might be silly and not heroic, but bravely stifling her
+doubt. "My cousin Virginia is housekeeper, and Rachel does the sewing,
+and I'm a kind of maid-of-all-work."
+
+Mr. Arbuton listened respectfully, vainly striving for some likeness of
+Miss Ellison in the figure of the different second-girls who, during
+life, had taken his card, or shown him into drawing-rooms, or waited on
+him at table; failing in this, he tried her in the character of daughter
+of that kind of farm-house where they take summer boarders and do their
+own work; but evidently the Ellisons were not of that sort either; and
+he gave it up and was silent, not knowing what to say, while Kitty, a
+little piqued by his silence, went on: "We're not ashamed, you
+understand, of our ways; there's such a thing as being proud of not
+being proud; and that's what we are, or what I am; for the rest are not
+mean enough ever to think about it, and once I wasn't, either. But
+that's the kind of life I'm used to; and though I've read of other kinds
+of life a great deal, I've not been brought up to anything different,
+don't you understand? And maybe--I don't know--I mightn't like or
+respect your kind of people any more than they did me. My uncle taught
+us ideas that are quite different from yours; and what if I shouldn't be
+able to give them up?"
+
+"There is only one thing I know or see: I love you!" he said,
+passionately, and drew nearer by a step; but she put out her hand and
+repelled him with a gesture.
+
+"Sometimes you might be ashamed of me before those you knew to be my
+inferiors,--really common and coarse-minded people, but regularly
+educated, and used to money and fashion. I should cower before them, and
+I never could forgive you."
+
+"I've one answer to all this: I love you!"
+
+Kitty flushed in generous admiration of his magnanimity, and said, with
+more of tenderness than she had yet felt towards him, "I'm sorry that I
+can't answer you now, as you wish, Mr. Arbuton."
+
+"But you will, to-morrow."
+
+She shook her head. "I don't know; O, I don't know! I've been thinking
+of something. That Mrs. March asked me to visit her in Boston; but we
+had given up doing so, because of the long delay here. If I asked my
+cousins, they'd still go home that way. It's too bad to put you off
+again; but you must see me in Boston, if only for a day or two, and
+after you've got back into your old associations there, before I answer
+you. I'm in great trouble. You must wait, or I must say no."
+
+"I'll wait," said Mr. Arbuton.
+
+"O, _thank_ you," sighed Kitty, grateful for this patience, and not for
+the chance of still winning him; "you are very forbearing, I'm sure."
+
+She again put forth her hand, but not now to repel him. He clasped it,
+and kept it in his, then impulsively pressed it against his lips.
+
+Colonel and Mrs. Ellison had been watching the whole pantomime,
+forgotten.
+
+"Well," said the colonel, "I suppose that's the end of the play, isn't
+it? I don't like it, Fanny; I don't like it."
+
+"Hush!" whispered Mrs. Ellison.
+
+They were both puzzled when Kitty and Mr. Arbuton came towards them with
+anxious faces. Kitty was painfully revolving in her mind what she had
+just said, and thinking she had said not so much as she meant and yet so
+much more, and tormenting herself with the fear that she had been at
+once too bold and too meek in her demand for longer delay. Did it not
+give him further claim upon her? Must it not have seemed a very
+audacious thing? What right had she to make it, and how could she now
+finally say no? Then the matter of her explanation to him: was it in the
+least what she meant to say? Must it not give him an idea of
+intellectual and spiritual poverty in her life which she knew had not
+been in it? Would he not believe, in spite of her boasts, that she was
+humiliated before him by a feeling of essential inferiority? O, _had_
+she boasted? What she meant to do was just to make him understand
+clearly what she was; but, had she? Could he be made to understand this
+with what seemed his narrow conception of things outside of his own
+experience? Was it worth while to try? Did she care enough for him to
+make the effort desirable? Had she made it for his sake, or in the
+interest of truth, merely, or in self-defence?
+
+These and a thousand other like questions beset her the whole way home
+to Quebec, amid the frequent pauses of the talk, and underneath whatever
+she was saying. Half the time she answered yes or no to them, and not to
+what Dick, or Fanny, or Mr. Arbuton had asked her; she was distraught
+with their recurrence, as they teased about her like angry bees, and one
+now and then settled, and stung and stung. Through the whole night, too,
+they pursued her in dreams with pitiless iteration and fantastic change;
+and at dawn she was awakened by voices calling up to her from the
+Ursulines' Garden,--the slim, pale nun crying out, in a lamentable
+accent, that all men were false and there was no shelter save the
+convent or the grave, and the comfortable sister bemoaning herself that
+on meagre days Madame de la Peltrie ate nothing but choke-cherries from
+Chateau-Bigot.
+
+Kitty rose and dressed herself, and sat at the window, and watched the
+morning come into the garden below: first, a tremulous flush of the
+heavens; then a rosy light on the silvery roofs and gables; then little
+golden aisles among the lilacs and hollyhocks. The tiny flower-beds just
+under her window were left, with their snap-dragons and larkspurs, in
+dew and shadow; the small dog stood on the threshold, and barked
+uneasily when the bell rang in the Ursulines' Chapel, where the nuns
+were at matins.
+
+It was Sunday, and a soft tranquillity blest the cool air in which the
+young girl bathed her troubled spirit. A faint anticipative homesickness
+mingled now with her nightlong anxiety,--a pity for herself that on the
+morrow she must leave those pretty sights, which had become so dear to
+her that she could not but feel herself native among them. She must go
+back to Eriecreek, which was not a walled city, and had not a stone
+building, much less a cathedral or convent, within its borders; and
+though she dearly loved those under her uncle's roof there, yet she had
+to own that, beyond that shelter, there was little in Eriecreek to touch
+the heart or take the fancy; that the village was ugly, and the village
+people mortally dull, narrow, and uncongenial. Why was not her lot cast
+somewhere else? Why should she not see more of the world that she had
+found so fair, and which all her aspirations had fitted her to enjoy?
+Quebec had been to her a rapture of beautiful antiquity; but Europe, but
+London, Venice, Rome, those infinitely older and more storied cities of
+which she had lately talked so much with Mr. Arbuton,--why should she
+not see them?
+
+Here, for the guilty space of a heat-lightning flash, Kitty wickedly
+entertained the thought of marrying Mr. Arbuton for the sake of a bridal
+trip to Europe, and bade love and the fitness of things and the
+incompatibility of Boston and Eriecreek traditions take care of
+themselves. But then she blushed for her meanness, and tried to atone
+for it as she could by meditating the praise of Mr. Arbuton. She felt
+remorse for having, as he had proved yesterday, undervalued and
+misunderstood him; and she was willing now to think him even more
+magnanimous than his generous words and conduct showed him. It would be
+a base return for his patience to accept him from a worldly ambition; a
+man of his noble spirit merited the best that love could give. But she
+respected him; at last she respected him fully and entirely, and she
+could tell him that at any rate.
+
+The words in which he had yesterday protested his love for her repeated
+themselves constantly in her revery. If he should speak them again after
+he had seen her in Boston, in the light by which she was anxious to be
+tested,--she did not know what she should say.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+ORDEAL.
+
+
+They had not planned to go anywhere that day; but after church they
+found themselves with the loveliest afternoon of their stay at Quebec to
+be passed somehow, and it was a pity to pass it indoors, the colonel
+said at their early dinner. They canvassed the attractions of the
+different drives out of town, and they decided upon that to Lorette. The
+Ellisons had already been there, but Mr. Arbuton had not, and it was
+from a dim motive of politeness towards him that Mrs. Ellison chose the
+excursion; though this did not prevent her from wondering aloud
+afterward, from time to time, why she had chosen it. He was restless and
+absent, and answered at random when points of the debate were referred
+to him, but he eagerly assented to the conclusion, and was in haste to
+set out.
+
+The road to Lorette is through St. John's Gate, down into the outlying
+meadows and rye-fields, where, crossing and recrossing the swift St.
+Charles, it finally rises at Lorette above the level of the citadel. It
+is a lonelier road than that to Montmorenci, and the scattering cottages
+upon it have not the well-to-do prettiness, the operatic repair, of
+stone-built Beauport. But they are charming, nevertheless, and the
+people seem to be remoter from modern influences. Peasant-girls, in
+purple gowns and broad straw hats, and not the fashions of the year
+before last, now and then appeared to our acquaintance; near one ancient
+cottage an old man, in the true habitant's red woollen cap with a long
+fall, leaned over the bars of his gate and smoked a short pipe.
+
+By and by they came to Jeune-Lorette, an almost ideally pretty hamlet,
+bordering the road on either hand with galleried and balconied little
+houses, from which the people bowed to them as they passed, and piously
+enclosing in its midst the village church and churchyard. They soon
+after reached Lorette itself, which they might easily have known for an
+Indian town by its unkempt air, and the irregular attitudes in which the
+shabby cabins lounged along the lanes that wandered through it, even if
+the Ellisons had not known it already, or if they had not been welcomed
+by a pomp of Indian boys and girls of all shades of darkness. The girls
+had bead-wrought moccasins and work-bags to sell, and the boys bore bows
+and arrows and burst into loud cries of "Shoot! shoot! grand shoot!
+Put-up-pennies! shoot-the-pennies! Grand shoot!" When they recognized
+the colonel, as they did after the party had dismounted in front of the
+church, they renewed these cries with greater vehemence.
+
+"Now, Richard," implored his wife, "you're _not_ going to let those
+little pests go through all that shooting performance again?"
+
+"I must. It is expected of me whenever I come to Lorette; and I would
+never be the man to neglect an ancient observance of this kind." The
+colonel stuck a copper into the hard sand as he spoke, and a small storm
+of arrows hurtled around it. Presently it flew into the air, and a
+fair-faced, blue-eyed boy picked it up: he won most of the succeeding
+coins.
+
+"There's an aborigine of pure blood," remarked the colonel; "his
+ancestors came from Normandy two hundred years ago. That's the reason he
+uses the bow so much better than these coffee-colored impostors."
+
+They went into the chapel, which stands on the site of the ancient
+church burnt not long ago. It is small, and it is bare and rude inside,
+with only the commonest ornamentation about the altar, on one side of
+which was the painted wooden statue of a nun, on the other that of a
+priest,--slight enough commemoration of those who had suffered so much
+for the hopeless race that lingers and wastes at Lorette in incurable
+squalor and wildness. They are Christians after their fashion, this poor
+remnant of the mighty Huron nation converted by the Jesuits and crushed
+by the Iroquois in the far-western wilderness; but whatever they are at
+heart, they are still savage in countenance, and these boys had faces of
+wolves and foxes. They followed their visitors into the church, where
+there was only an old woman praying to a picture, beneath which hung a
+votive hand and foot, and a few young Huron suppliants with very sleek
+hair, whose wandering devotions seemed directed now at the strangers,
+and now at the wooden effigy of the House of St. Ann borne by two gilt
+angels above the high-altar. There was no service, and the visitors soon
+quitted the chapel amid the clamors of the boys outside. Some young
+girls, in the dress of our period, were promenading up and down the road
+with their arms about each other and their eyes alert for the effect
+upon spectators.
+
+From one of the village lanes came swaggering towards the visitors a
+figure of aggressive fashion,--a very buckish young fellow, with a heavy
+black mustache and black eyes, who wore a jaunty round hat, blue checked
+trousers, a white vest, and a morning-coat of blue diagonals, buttoned
+across his breast; in his hand he swung a light cane.
+
+"That is the son of the chief, Paul Picot," whispered the driver.
+
+"Excuse me," said the colonel, instantly; and the young gentleman
+nodded. "Can you tell me if we could see the chief to-day?"
+
+"O yes!" answered the notary in English, "my father is chief. You can
+see him"; and passed on with a somewhat supercilious air.
+
+The colonel, in his first hours at Quebec, had bought at a bazaar of
+Indian wares the photograph of an Indian warrior in a splendor of
+factitious savage panoply. It was called "The Last of the Hurons," and
+the colonel now avenged himself for the curtness of M. Picot by styling
+him "The Next to the Last of the Hurons."
+
+"Well," said Fanny, who had a wife's willingness to see her husband
+occasionally snubbed, "I don't know why you asked him. I'm sure nobody
+wants to see that old chief and his wretched bead trumpery again."
+
+"My dear," answered the colonel, "wherever Americans go, they like to be
+presented at court. Mr. Arbuton, here, I've no doubt has been introduced
+to the crowned heads of the Old World, and longs to pay his respects to
+the sovereign of Lorette. Besides, I always call upon the reigning
+prince when I come to Lorette. The coldness of the heir-apparent shall
+not repel me."
+
+The colonel led the way up the principal lane of the village. Some of
+the cabins were ineffectually whitewashed, but none of them were so
+uncleanly within as the outside prophesied. At the doors and windows sat
+women and young girls working moccasins; here and there stood a well-fed
+mother of a family with an infant Huron in her arms. They all showed the
+traces of white blood, as did the little ones who trooped after the
+strangers and demanded charity as clamorously as so many Italians; only
+a few faces were of a clear dark, as if stained by walnut-juice, and it
+was plain that the Hurons were fading, if not dying out. They responded
+with a queer mixture of French liveliness and savage stolidity to the
+colonel's jocose advances. Great lean dogs lounged about the thresholds;
+they and the women and children were alone visible; there were no men.
+None of the houses were fenced, save the chief's; this stood behind a
+neat grass plot, across which, at the moment our travellers came up, two
+youngish women were trailing in long morning-gowns and eye-glasses. The
+chief's house was a handsome cottage, papered and carpeted, with a huge
+stove in the parlor, where also stood a table exposing the bead trumpery
+of Mrs. Ellison's scorn. A full-bodied elderly man with quick, black
+eyes and a tranquil, dark face stood near it; he wore a half-military
+coat with brass buttons, and was the chief Picot. At sight of the
+colonel he smiled slightly and gave his hand in welcome. Then he sold
+such of his wares as the colonel wanted, rather discouraging than
+inviting purchase. He talked, upon some urgency, of his people, who, he
+said, numbered three hundred, and were a few of them farmers, but were
+mostly hunters, and, in the service of the officers of the garrison,
+spent the winter in the chase. He spoke fair English, but reluctantly,
+and he seemed glad to have his guests go, who were indeed willing enough
+to leave him.
+
+Mr. Arbuton especially was willing, for he had been longing to find
+himself alone with Kitty, of which he saw no hope while the idling about
+the village lasted.
+
+The colonel bought an insane watch-pocket for _une dolleur_ from a
+pretty little girl as they returned through the village; but he forbade
+the boys any more archery at his expense, with "Pas de grand shoot,
+_now_, mes enfans!--Friends," he added to his own party, "we have the
+Falls of Lorette and the better part of the afternoon still before us;
+how shall we employ them?"
+
+Mrs. Ellison and Kitty did not know, and Mr. Arbuton did not know, as
+they sauntered down past the chapel, to the stone mill that feeds its
+industry from the beauty of the fall. The cascade, with two or three
+successive leaps above the road, plunges headlong down a steep
+crescent-shaped slope, and hides its foamy whiteness in the
+dark-foliaged ravine below. It is a wonder of graceful motion, of
+iridescent lights and delicious shadows; a shape of loveliness that
+seems instinct with a conscious life. Its beauty, like that of all
+natural marvels on our continent, is on a generous scale; and now the
+spectators, after viewing it from the mill, passed for a different
+prospect of it to the other shore, and there the colonel and Fanny
+wandered a little farther down the glen, leaving Kitty with Mr. Arbuton.
+The affair between them was in such a puzzling phase, that there was as
+much reason for as against this: nobody could do anything, not even
+openly recognize it. Besides, it was somehow very interesting to Kitty
+to be there alone with him, and she thought that if all were well, and
+he and she were really engaged, the sense of recent betrothal could be
+nowhere else half so sweet as in that wild and lovely place. She began
+to imagine a bliss so divine, that it would have been strange if she had
+not begun to desire it, and it was with a half reluctant,
+half-acquiescent thrill that she suffered him to touch upon what was
+first in both their minds.
+
+"I thought you had agreed not to talk of that again for the present,"
+she feebly protested.
+
+"No; I was not forbidden to tell you I loved you: I only consented to
+wait for my answer; but now I shall break my promise. I cannot wait. I
+think the conditions you make dishonor me," said Mr. Arbuton, with an
+impetuosity that fascinated her.
+
+"O, how can you say such a thing as that?" she asked, liking him for his
+resentment of conditions that he found humiliating, while her heart
+leaped remorseful to her lips for having imposed them. "You know very
+well why I wanted to delay; and you know that--that--if--I had done
+anything to wound you, I never could forgive myself."
+
+"But you doubted me, all the same," he rejoined.
+
+"Did I? I thought it was myself that I doubted." She was stricken with
+sudden misgiving as to what had seemed so well; her words tended rapidly
+she could not tell whither.
+
+"But why do you doubt yourself?"
+
+"I--I don't know."
+
+"No," he said bitterly, "for it's really me that you doubt. I can't
+understand what you have seen in me that makes you believe anything
+could change me towards you," he added with a kind of humbleness that
+touched her. "I could have borne to think that I was not worthy of you."
+
+"Not worthy of me! I never dreamed of such a thing."
+
+"But to have you suspect me of such meanness--"
+
+"O Mr. Arbuton!"
+
+--"As you hinted yesterday, is a disgrace that I ought not to bear. I
+have thought of it all night; and I must have my answer now, whatever it
+is."
+
+She did not speak; for every word that she had uttered had only served
+to close escape behind her. She did not know what to do; she looked up
+at him for help. He said with an accent of meekness pathetic from him,
+"Why must you still doubt me?"
+
+"I don't," she scarcely more than breathed.
+
+"Then you are mine, now, without waiting, and forever," he cried; and
+caught her to him in a swift embrace.
+
+She only said, "Oh!" in a tone of gentle reproach, yet clung to him a
+helpless moment as for rescue from himself. She looked at him in blank
+pallor, striving to realize the tender violence in which his pulses
+wildly exulted; then a burning flush dyed her face, and tears came into
+her eyes. "O, I hope you'll never be sorry," she said; and then, "Do let
+us go," for she had no distinct desire save for movement, for escape
+from that place.
+
+Her heart had been surprised, she hardly knew how; but at his kiss a
+novel tenderness had leaped to life in it. She suffered him to put her
+hand upon his arm, and then she began to feel a strange pride in his
+being tall and handsome, and hers. But she kept thinking as they walked,
+"I hope he'll never he sorry," and she said it again, half in jest. He
+pressed her hand against his heart, and met her look with one of protest
+and reassurance, that presently melted into something sweeter yet. He
+said, "What beautiful eyes you have! I noticed the long lashes when I
+saw you on the Saguenay boat, and I couldn't get away from them."
+
+"O please, don't speak of that dreadful time!" cried Kitty.
+
+"No? Why not?"
+
+"O because! I think it was such a bold kind of accident my taking your
+arm by mistake; and the whole next day has always been a perfect horror
+to me."
+
+He looked at her in questioning amaze.
+
+"I think I was very pert with you all day,--and I don't think I'm pert
+naturally,--taking you up about the landscape, and twitting you about
+the Saguenay scenery and legends, you know. But I thought you were
+trying to put me down,--you are rather down-putting at times,--and I
+admired you, and I couldn't bear it."
+
+"Oh!" said Mr. Arbuton. He dimly recollected, as if it had been in some
+former state of existence, that there were things he had not approved in
+Kitty that day, but now he met her penitence with a smile and another
+pressure of the hand. "Well, then," he said, "if you don't like to
+recall that time, let's go back of it to the day I met you on Goat
+Island Bridge at Niagara."
+
+"O, did you see _me_ there? I thought you didn't; but _I_ saw _you_. You
+had on a blue cravat," she answered; and he returned with as much the
+air of coherency as if really continuing the same train of thought, "You
+won't think it necessary to visit Boston, now, I suppose," and he smiled
+triumphantly upon her. "I fancy that I have now a better right to
+introduce you there than your South End friends."
+
+Kitty smiled, too. "I'm willing to wait. But don't you think you ought
+to see Eriecreek before you promise too solemnly? I can't allow that
+there's anything serious, till you've seen me at home."
+
+They had been going, for no reason that they knew, back to the country
+inn near which you purchase admittance to a certain view of the falls,
+and now they sat down on the piazza, somewhat apart from other people
+who were there, as Mr. Arbuton said, "O, I shall visit Eriecreek soon
+enough. But I shall not come to put myself or you to the proof. I don't
+ask to see you at home before claiming you forever."
+
+Kitty murmured, "Ah! you are more generous than I was."
+
+"I doubt it."
+
+"O yes, you are. But I wonder if you'll be able to find Eriecreek."
+
+"Is it on the map?"
+
+"It's on the county map; and so is Uncle Jack's lot on it, and a picture
+of his house, for that matter. They'll all be standing on the
+piazza--something like this one--when you come up. You'll know Uncle
+Jack by his big gray beard, and his bushy eyebrows, and his boots, which
+he won't have blacked, and his Leghorn hat, which we can't get him to
+change. The girls will be there with him,--Virginia all red and heated
+with having got supper for you, and Rachel with the family mending in
+her hand,--and they'll both come running down the walk to welcome you.
+How will you like it?"
+
+Mr. Arbuton suspected the gross caricature of this picture, and smiled
+securely at it. "I shall like it well enough," he said, "if you run down
+with them. Where shall you be?"
+
+"I forgot. I shall be up stairs in my room, peeping through the
+window-blinds, to see how you take it. Then I shall come down, and
+receive you with dignity in the parlor, but after supper you'll have to
+excuse me while I help with the dishes. Uncle Jack will talk to you.
+He'll talk to you about Boston. He's much fonder of Boston than you are,
+even." And here Kitty broke off with a laugh, thinking what a very
+different Boston her Uncle Jack's was from Mr. Arbuton's, and
+maliciously diverted with what she conceived of their mutual
+bewilderment in trying to get some common stand-point. He had risen from
+his chair, and was now standing a few paces from her, looking toward the
+fall, as if by looking he might delay the coming of the colonel and
+Fanny.
+
+She checked her merriment a moment to take note of two ladies who were
+coming up the path towards the porch where she was sitting. Mr. Arbuton
+did not see them. The ladies mounted the steps, and turned slowly and
+languidly to survey the company. But at sight of Mr. Arbuton, one of
+them advanced directly toward him, with exclamations of surprise and
+pleasure, and he with a stupefied face and a mechanical movement turned
+to meet her.
+
+She was a lady of more than middle age, dressed with certain personal
+audacities of color and shape, rather than overdressed, and she thrust
+forward, in expression of her amazement, a very small hand, wonderfully
+well gloved; her manner was full of the anxiety of a woman who had
+fought hard for a high place in society, and yet suggested a latent
+hatred of people who, in yielding to her, had made success bitter and
+humiliating.
+
+Her companion was a young and very handsome girl, exquisitely dressed,
+and just so far within the fashion as to show her already a mistress of
+style. But it was not the vivid New York stylishness. A peculiar
+restraint of line, an effect of lady-like concession to the ruling mode,
+a temperance of ornament, marked the whole array, and stamped it with
+the unmistakable character of Boston. Her clear tints of lip and cheek
+and eye were incomparable; her blond hair gave weight to the poise of
+her delicate head by its rich and decent masses. She had a look of
+independent innocence, an angelic expression of extremely nice young
+fellow blending with a subtle maidenly charm. She indicated her surprise
+at seeing Mr. Arbuton by pressing the point of her sun-umbrella somewhat
+nervously upon the floor, and blushing a very little. Then she gave him
+her hand with friendly frankness, and smiled dazzlingly upon him, while
+the elder hailed him with effusive assertion of familiar acquaintance,
+heaping him with greetings and flatteries and cries of pleasure.
+
+"O dear!" sighed Kitty, "these are old friends of his; and will I have
+to know them? Perhaps it's best to begin at once, though," she thought.
+
+But he made no movement toward her where she sat. The ladies began to
+walk up and down, and he with them. As they passed her, he did not seem
+to see her.
+
+The ladies said they were waiting for their carriage, which they had
+left at a certain point when they went to look at the fall, and had
+ordered to take them up at the inn. They talked about people and things
+that Kitty had never heard of.
+
+"Have you seen the Trailings since you left Newport?" asked the elder
+woman.
+
+"No," said Mr. Arbuton.
+
+"Perhaps you'll be surprised then--or perhaps you won't--to hear that we
+parted with them on the top of Mount Washington, Thursday. And the
+Mayflowers are at the Glen House. The mountains are horribly full. But
+what are you to do! Now the Continent"--she spoke as if the English
+Channel divided it from us--"is so common, you can't run over there any
+more."
+
+Whenever they walked towards Kitty, this woman, whose quick eye had
+detected Mr. Arbuton at her side as she came up to the inn, bent upon
+the young girl's face a stare of insolent curiosity, yet with a front of
+such impassive coldness that to another she might not have seemed aware
+of her presence. Kitty shuddered at the thought of being made acquainted
+with her; then she remembered, "Why, how stupid I am! Of course a
+gentleman can't introduce ladies; and the only thing for him to do is to
+excuse himself to them as soon as he can without rudeness, and come back
+to me." But none the less she felt helpless and deserted. Though
+ordinarily so brave, she was so beaten down by that look, that for a
+glance of not unkindly interest that the young lady gave her she was
+abjectly grateful. She admired her, and fancied that she could easily be
+friends with such a girl as that, if they met fairly. She wondered that
+she should be there with that other, not knowing that society cannot
+really make distinctions between fine and coarse, and could not have
+given her a reason for their association.
+
+Still the three walked up and down before Kitty, and still she made his
+peace with herself, thinking, "He is embarrassed; he can't come to me at
+once; but he will, of course."
+
+The elder of his companions talked on in her loud voice of this thing
+and that, of her summer, and of the people she had met, and of their
+places and yachts and horses, and all the splendors of their
+keeping,--talk which Kitty's aching sense sometimes caught by fragments,
+and sometimes in full. The lady used a slang of deprecation and apology
+for having come to such a queer resort as Quebec, and raised her brows
+when Mr. Arbuton reluctantly owned how long he had been there.
+
+"Ah, ah!" she said briskly, bringing the group to a stand-still while
+she spoke, "one doesn't stay in a slow Canadian city a whole month for
+love of the _place_. Come, Mr. Arbuton, is she English or French?"
+
+Kitty's heart beat thickly, and she whispered to herself, "O, now!--now
+surely he _must_ do something."
+
+"Or perhaps," continued his tormentor, "she's some fair fellow-wanderer
+in these Canadian wilds,--some pretty companion of voyage."
+
+Mr. Arbuton gave a kind of start at this, like one thrilled for an
+instant with a sublime impulse. He cast a quick, stealthy look at Kitty,
+and then as suddenly withdrew his glance. What had happened to her who
+was usually dressed so prettily? Alas! true to her resolution, Kitty had
+again refused Fanny's dresses that morning, and had faithfully put on
+her own travelling-suit,--the suit which Rachel had made her, and which
+had seemed so very well at Eriecreek that they had called Uncle Jack in
+to admire it when it was tried on. Now she knew that it looked
+countrified, and its unstylishness struck in upon her, and made her feel
+countrified in soul. "Yes," she owned, as she met Mr. Arbuton's glance,
+"I'm nothing but an awkward milkmaid beside that young lady." This was
+unjust to herself; but truly it was never in her present figure that he
+had intended to show her to his world, which he had been sincere enough
+in contemning for her sake while away from it. Confronted with good
+society in these ladies, its delegates, he doubtless felt, as never
+before, the vastness of his self-sacrifice, the difficulty of his
+enterprise, and it would not have been so strange if just then she
+should have appeared to him through the hard cold vision of the best
+people instead of that which love had illumined. She saw whatever
+purpose toward herself was in his eyes, flicker and die out as they fell
+from hers. Then she sat alone while they three walked up and down, up
+and down, and the skirts of the ladies brushed her garments in passing.
+
+"O, where can Dick and Fanny be?" she silently bemoaned herself, "and
+why don't they come and save me from these dreadful people?"
+
+She sat in a stony quiet while they talked on, she thought, forever.
+Their voices sounded in her ears like voices heard in a dream, their
+laughter had a nightmare cruelty. Yet she was resolved to be just to Mr.
+Arbuton, she was determined not meanly to condemn him; she confessed to
+herself, with a glimmer of her wonted humor, that her dress must be an
+ordeal of peculiar anguish to him, and she half blamed herself for her
+conscientiousness in wearing it. If she had conceived of any such chance
+as this, she would perhaps, she thought, have worn Fanny's grenadine.
+
+She glanced again at the group which was now receding from her. "Ah!"
+the elder of the ladies said, again halting the others midway of the
+piazza's length, "there's the carriage at last! But what is that stupid
+animal stopping for? O, I suppose he didn't understand, and expects to
+take us up at the bridge! Provoking! But it's no use; we may as well go
+to him at once; it's plain he isn't coming to us. Mr. Arbuton, will you
+see us on board?"
+
+"Who--I? Yes, certainly," he answered absently, and for the second time
+he cast a furtive look at Kitty, who had half started to her feet in
+expectation of his coming to her before he went,--a look of appeal, or
+deprecation, or reassurance, as she chose to interpret it, but after all
+a look only.
+
+She sank back in blank rejection of his look, and so remained motionless
+as he led the way from the porch with a quick and anxious step. Since
+those people came he had not openly recognized her presence, and now he
+had left her without a word. She could not believe what she could not
+but divine, and she was powerless to stir as the three moved down the
+road towards the carriage. Then she felt the tears spring to her eyes:
+she flung down her veil, and, swept on by a storm of grief and pride and
+pain, she hurried, ran towards the grounds about the falls. She thrust
+aside the boy who took money at the gate. "I have no money," she said
+fiercely; "I'm going to look for my friends: they're in here."
+
+But Dick and Fanny were not to be seen. Instead, as she fluttered wildly
+about in search of them, she beheld Mr. Arbuton, who had missed her on
+his return to the inn, coming with a frightened face to look for her.
+She had hoped, somehow never to see him again in the world; but since it
+was to be, she stood still and waited his approach in a strange
+composure; while he drew nearer, thinking how yesterday he had silenced
+her prophetic doubt of him: "I have one answer to all this; I love you."
+Her faltering words, verified so fatally soon, recalled themselves to
+him with intolerable accusation. And what should he say now? If
+possibly,--if by some miracle,--she might not have seen what he feared
+she must! One glance that he dared give her taught him better; and while
+she waited for him to speak, he could not lure any of the phrases, of
+which the air seemed full, to serve him.
+
+"I wonder you came back to me," she said after an eternal moment.
+
+"Came back?" he echoed, vacantly.
+
+"You seemed to have forgotten my existence!"
+
+Of course the whole wrong, if any wrong had been done to her, was tacit,
+and much might be said to prove that she felt needlessly aggrieved, and
+that he could not have acted otherwise than as he did; she herself had
+owned that it must be an embarrassing position to him.
+
+"Why, what have I done," he began, "what makes you think... For heaven's
+sake listen to me!" he cried; and then, while she turned a mute
+attentive face to him, he stood silent as before, like one who has lost
+his thought, and strives to recall what he was going to say. "What
+sense,--what use," he resumed at last, as if continuing the course of
+some previous argument, "would there have been in making a display of
+our acquaintance before them? I did not suppose at first that they saw
+us together."... But here he broke off, and, indeed, his explanation had
+but a mean effect when put into words. "I did not expect them to stay. I
+thought they would go away every moment; and then at last it was too
+late to manage the affair without seeming to force it." This was better;
+and he paused again, for some sign of acquiescence from Kitty, and
+caught her eye fixed on his face in what seemed contemptuous wonder. His
+own eyes fell, and ran uneasily over her dress before he lifted them and
+began once more, as if freshly inspired: "I could have wished you to be
+known to my friends with every advantage on your side," and this had
+such a magnanimous sound that he took courage; "and you ought to have
+had faith enough in me to believe that I never could have meant you a
+slight. If you had known more of the world,--if your social experience
+had been greater you would have seen.... Oh!" he cried, desperately, "is
+there nothing you have to say to me?"
+
+"No," said Kitty, simply, but with a languid quiet, and shrinking from
+speech as from an added pang. "You have been telling me that you were
+ashamed of me in this dress before those people. But I knew that
+already. What do you want me to do?"
+
+"If you give me time, I can make everything clear to you."
+
+"But now you don't deny it."
+
+"Deny what? I--"
+
+But here the whole fabric of Mr. Arbuton's defence toppled to the
+ground. He was a man of scrupulous truth, not accustomed to deceive
+himself or others. He had been ashamed of her, he could not deny it, not
+to keep the love that was now dearer to him than life. He saw it with
+paralyzing clearness; and, as an inexorable fact that confounded quite
+as much as it dismayed him, he perceived that throughout that ignoble
+scene she had been the gentle person and he the vulgar one. How could it
+have happened with a man like him! As he looked back upon it, he seemed
+to have been only the helpless sport of a sinister chance.
+
+But now he must act; it could not go so, it was too horrible a thing to
+let stand confessed. A hundred protests thronged to his lips, but he
+refused utterance to them all as worse even than silence; and so, still
+meaning to speak, he could not speak. He could only stand and wait while
+it wrung his heart to see her trembling, grieving lips.
+
+His own aspect was so lamentable, that she half pitied him, half
+respected him for his truth's sake. "You were right; I think it won't be
+necessary for me to go to Boston," she said with a dim smile. "Good by.
+It's all been a dreadful, dreadful mistake."
+
+It was like him, even in that humiliation, not to have thought of losing
+her, not to have dreamed but that he could somehow repair his error, and
+she would yet willingly be his. "O no, no, no," he cried, starting
+forward, "don't say that! It can't be, it mustn't be! You are angry now,
+but I know you'll see it differently. Don't be so quick with me, with
+yourself. I will do anything, say anything, you like."
+
+The tears stood in her eyes; but they were cruel drops. "You can't say
+anything that wouldn't make it worse. You can't undo what's been done,
+and that's only a little part of what couldn't be undone. The best way
+is for us to part; it's the only way."
+
+"No, there are all the ways in the world besides! Wait--think!--I
+implore you not to be so--precipitate."
+
+The unfortunate word incensed her the more; it intimated that she was
+ignorantly throwing too much away. "I am not rash now, but I was very
+rash half an hour ago. I shall not change my mind again. O," she cried,
+giving way, "it isn't what you've done, but what you _are_ and what _I_
+am, that's the great trouble! I could easily forgive what's
+happened,--if you asked it; but I couldn't alter both our whole lives,
+or make myself over again, and you couldn't change yourself. Perhaps you
+would try, and I know that I would, but it would be a wretched failure
+and disappointment as long as we lived. I've learnt a great deal since I
+first saw those people." And in truth he felt as if the young girl whom
+he had been meaning to lift to a higher level than her own at his side
+had somehow suddenly grown beyond him; and his heart sank. "It's foolish
+to try to argue such a thing, but it's true; and you must let me go."
+
+"I _can't_ let you go," he said in such a way, that she longed at least
+to part kindly with him.
+
+"You can make it hard for me," she answered, "but the end will be the
+same."
+
+"I won't make it hard for you, then," he returned, after a pause, in
+which he grew paler and she stood with a wan face plucking the red
+leaves from a low bough that stretched itself towards her.
+
+He turned and walked away some steps; then he came suddenly back. "I
+wish to express my regret," he began formally, and with his old air of
+doing what was required of him as a gentleman, "that I should have
+unintentionally done anything to wound--"
+
+"O, better not speak of _that_," interrupted Kitty with bitterness,
+"it's all over now." And the final tinge of superiority in his manner
+made her give him a little stab of dismissal. "Good by. I see my cousins
+coming."
+
+She stood and watched him walk away, the sunlight playing on his figure
+through the mantling leaves, till he passed out of the grove.
+
+The cataract roared with a seven-fold tumult in her ears, and danced
+before her eyes. All things swam together, as in her blurred sight her
+cousins came wavering towards her.
+
+"Where is Mr. Arbuton?" asked Mrs. Ellison.
+
+Kitty threw her arms about the neck of that foolish woman, whoso loving
+heart she could not doubt, and clung sobbing to her. "Gone," she said;
+and Mrs. Ellison, wise for once, asked no more.
+
+She had the whole story that evening, without asking; and whilst she
+raged, she approved of Kitty, and covered her with praises and
+condolences.
+
+"Why, of course, Fanny, I didn't care for _knowing_ those people. What
+should I want to know them for? But what hurt me was that he should so
+postpone me to them, and ignore me before them, and leave me without a
+word, then, when I ought to have been everything in the world to him and
+first of all. I believe things came to me while I sat there, as they do
+to drowning people, all at once, and I saw the whole affair more
+distinctly than ever I did. We were too far apart in what we had been
+and what we believed in and respected, ever to grow really together. And
+if he gave me the highest position in the world, I should have only
+that. He never could like the people who had been good to me, and whom I
+loved so dearly, and he only could like me as far as he could estrange
+me from them. If he could coolly put me aside _now_, how would it be
+afterwards with the rest, and with me too? That's what flashed through
+me, and I don't believe that getting splendidly married is as good as
+being true to the love that came long before, and honestly living your
+own life out, without fear or trembling, whatever it is. So perhaps,"
+said Kitty, with a fresh burst of tears, "you needn't condole with me so
+much, Fanny. Perhaps if you had seen him, you would have thought he was
+the one to be pitied. _I_ pitied him, though he _was_ so cruel. When he
+first turned to meet them, you'd have thought he was a man sentenced to
+death, or under some dreadful spell or other; and while he was walking
+up and down listening to that horrible comical old woman,--the young
+lady didn't talk much,--and trying to make straight answers to her, and
+to look as if I didn't exist, it was the most ridiculous thing in the
+world."
+
+"How queer you are, Kitty!"
+
+"Yes; but you needn't think I didn't feel it. I seemed to be like two
+persons sitting there, one in agony, and one just coolly watching it.
+But O," she broke out again while Fanny held her closer in her arms,
+"how could he have done it, how could he have acted so towards me; and
+just after I had begun to think him so generous and noble! It seems too
+dreadful to be true." And with this Kitty kissed her cousin and they had
+a little cry together over the trust so done to death; and Kitty dried
+her eyes, and bade Fanny a brave good-night, and went off to weep again,
+upon her pillow.
+
+But before that, she called Fanny to her door, and with a smile breaking
+through the trouble of her face, she asked, "How do you suppose he got
+back? I never thought of it before."
+
+"_Oh!_" cried Mrs. Ellison with profound disgust, "I hope he had to
+_walk_ back. But I'm afraid there were only too many chances for him to
+ride. I dare say he could get a calash at the hotel there."
+
+Kitty had not spoken a word of reproach to Fanny for her part in
+promoting this hapless affair; and when the latter, returning to her own
+room, found the colonel there, she told him the story and then began to
+discern that she was not without credit for Kitty's fortunate escape, as
+she called it.
+
+"Yes," said the colonel, "under exactly similar circumstances she'll
+know just what to expect another time, if that's any comfort."
+
+"It's a _great_ comfort," retorted Mrs. Ellison; "you can't find out
+what the world is, too soon, I can tell you; and if I hadn't maneuvered
+a little to bring them together, Kitty might have gone off with some
+lingering fancy for him; and think what a misfortune that would have
+been!"
+
+"Horrible."
+
+"And now, she'll not have a single regret for him."
+
+"I should think not," said the colonel; and he spoke in a tone of such
+dejection, that it went to his wife's heart more than any reproach of
+Kitty's could have done. "You're all right, and nobody blames you,
+Fanny; but if _you_ think it's well for such a girl as Kitty to find out
+that a man who has had the best that the world can give, and has really
+some fine qualities of his own, can be such a poor devil, after all,
+then _I_ don't. She may be the wiser for it, but you know she won't be
+the happier."
+
+"O _don't_, Dick, don't speak seriously! It's so dreadful from _you_. If
+you feel so about it, why don't you do something."
+
+"O yes, there's a fine opening. We know, because we know ever so much
+more, how the case really is; but the way it seems to stand is, that
+Kitty couldn't bear to have him show civility to his friends, and ran
+away, and then wouldn't give him a chance to explain. Besides, what
+could I do under any circumstances?"
+
+"Well, Dick, of course you're right, and I wish I could see things as
+clearly as you do. But I really believe Kitty's glad to be out of it."
+
+"What?" thundered the colonel.
+
+"I think Kitty's secretly relieved to have it all over. But you needn't
+_stun_ me."
+
+"You _do_?" The colonel paused as if to gain force enough for a reply.
+But after waiting, nothing whatever came to him, and he wound up his
+watch.
+
+"To be sure," added Mrs. Ellison thoughtfully, after a pause, "she's
+giving up a great deal; and she'll probably never have such another
+chance as long as she lives."
+
+"I hope she won't," said the colonel.
+
+"O, you needn't pretend that a high position and the social advantages
+he could have given her are to be despised."
+
+"No, you heartless worldling; and neither are peace of mind, and
+self-respect, and whole feelings, and your little joke."
+
+"O, you--you sickly sentimentalist!"
+
+"That's what they used to call us in the good old abolition days,"
+laughed the colonel; and the two being quite alone, they made their
+peace with a kiss, and were as happy for the moment as if they had
+thereby assuaged Kitty's grief and mortification.
+
+"Besides, Fanny," continued the colonel, "though I'm not much on
+religion, I believe these things are ordered."
+
+"Don't be blasphemous, Colonel Ellison!" cried his wife, who represented
+the church if not religion in her family. "As if Providence had anything
+to do with love-affairs!"
+
+"Well, I won't; but I will say that if Kitty turned her back on Mr.
+Arbuton and the social advantages he could offer her, it's a sign she
+wasn't fit for them. And, poor thing, if she doesn't know how much she's
+lost, why she has the less to grieve over. If she thinks she couldn't be
+happy with a husband who would keep her snubbed and frightened after he
+lifted her from her lowly sphere, and would tremble whenever she met any
+of his own sort, of course it may be a sad mistake, but it can't be
+helped. She must go back to Eriecreek, and try to worry along without
+him. Perhaps she'll work out her destiny some other way."
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+AFTERWARDS.
+
+
+Mrs. Ellison had Kitty's whole story, and so has the reader, but for a
+little thing that happened next day, and which is perhaps scarcely
+worthy of being set down.
+
+Mr. Arbuton's valise was sent for at night from the Hotel St. Louis, and
+they did not see him again. When Kitty woke next morning, a fine cold
+rain was falling upon the drooping hollyhocks in the Ursulines' Garden,
+which seemed stricken through every leaf and flower with sudden autumn.
+All the forenoon the garden-paths remained empty, but under the porch by
+the poplars sat the slender nun and the stout nun side by side, and held
+each other's hands. They did not move, they did not appear to speak.
+
+The fine cold rain was still falling as Kitty and Fanny drove down
+Mountain Street toward the Railway Station, whither Dick and the baggage
+had preceded them, for they were going away from Quebec. Midway, their
+carriage was stopped by a mass of ascending vehicles, and their driver
+drew rein till the press was over. At the same time Kitty saw advancing
+up the sidewalk a figure grotesquely resembling Mr. Arbuton. It was he,
+but shorter, and smaller, and meaner. Then it was not he, but only a
+light overcoat like his covering a very common little man about whom it
+hung loosely,--a burlesque of Mr. Arbuton's self-respectful overcoat, or
+the garment itself in a state of miserable yet comical collapse.
+
+"What is that ridiculous little wretch staring at you for, Kitty?" asked
+Fanny.
+
+"I don't know," answered Kitty, absently.
+
+The man was now smiling and gesturing violently. Kitty remembered having
+seen him before, and then recognized the cooper who had released Mr.
+Arbuton from the dog in the Sault au Matelot, and to whom he had given
+his lacerated overcoat.
+
+The little creature awkwardly unbuttoned the garment, and took from the
+breast-pocket a few letters, which he handed to Kitty, talking eagerly
+in French all the time.
+
+"What _is_ he doing, Kitty?"
+
+"What is he saying, Fanny?"
+
+"Something about a ferocious dog that was going to spring upon you, and
+the young gentleman being brave as a lion and rushing forward, and
+saving your life." Mrs. Ellison was not a woman to let her translation
+lack color, even though the original wanted it.
+
+"Make him tell it again."
+
+When the man had done so, "Yes," sighed Kitty, "it all happened that day
+of the Montgomery expedition; but I never knew, before, of what he had
+done for me. Fanny," she cried, with a great sob, "may be I'm the one
+who has been cruel? But what happened yesterday makes his having saved
+my life seem such a very little matter."
+
+"Nothing at all!" answered Fanny, "less than nothing!" But her heart
+failed her.
+
+The little cooper had bowed himself away, and was climbing the hill, Mr.
+Arbuton's coat-skirts striking his heels as he walked.
+
+"What letters are those?" asked Fanny.
+
+"O, old letters to Mr. Arbuton, which he found in the pocket. I suppose
+he thought I would give them to him."
+
+"But how are you going to do it?"
+
+"I ought to send them to him," answered Kitty. Then, after a silence
+that lasted till they reached the boat, she handed the letters to Fanny.
+"Dick may send them," she said.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Chance Acquaintance, by W. D. Howells
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