“Draw the wood, smoke the pipe, court the
ladies. — But would n'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 is n'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

[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]

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 would n'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
tried 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

[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]

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 is n'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

[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]

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 does n'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
need n'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

[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]

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 them,” 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,

[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]

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 get 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

[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]

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 is n't noted for anything in particular;
it 's not even on any railroad. It 's in the northwest
part of the State.”

“Is n'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 note quite comprehensible
yet certainly agreeable fact, though he still had a
disposition to cast her off as something incredible.

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]

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 overflowed
with newspapers of every kind, from the

[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]

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
wholsesome 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.

[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

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 does n'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

[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

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.

p608-078 III. ON THE WAY BACK TO QUEBEC.

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

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 would n'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 have n'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.”

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

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 breakfasttable;
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

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

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 did n'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, has n'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?”

[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]

“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

[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

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 be 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.

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

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 cloudcapt
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

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

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 be 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

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

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, is n'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

[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]

whistled; and “Oh!” shuddered Kitty, “does n'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 brighthooded,
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

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

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;

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

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 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, “is n't it cold?”
and she and her friends laughed.

“O dear!” thought Kitty, “I did n'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.

p608-095 IV. MR. ARBUTON'S INSPIRATION.

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

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 have n't got by yet,” said the colonel,
taking to the speaker. “Then the house is full?”

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

“Well, no; they have n't begun to throw them
out of the window.”

“His humor is degenerating, Dick,” said Kitty;
and “Had n'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.”

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

“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

[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]

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 did n't engage a room for you. I supposed
you 'd rather take your chances at the hotel.”

“O, I 'm going away to-night.”

[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]

“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.”

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

“O, as to that I don't know,” answered the
colonel, not recognizing the language of inspiration,
“let 's ask.” Kitty knocked a photographbook
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

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

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 woful 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

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

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 is n'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 need n'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

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

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 fourarmed
wooden trough on his shoulder was the

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

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.

p608-111 V. MR. ARBUTON MAKES HIMSELF AGREEABLE.

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

“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! You need n'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.”

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

“O, if he does n'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, is n'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

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

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
does n'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 must n'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.

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

“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 marketsquare
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

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

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 sidealtars,
assisted by acolytes in their every-day
clothes; and outside of the railing a marketwoman,
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

[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 111.[end figure description]

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,
untravelled 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.”

[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]

“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 steet 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

[figure description] Page 113.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Page 114.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 115.[end figure description]

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

[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]

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 æsthetic 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

[figure description] Page 117.[end figure description]

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, have n't you?”

“O yes, very nice. That is, the first part of it
was n't very nice; but after a while we reached

[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]

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 fellowbeings
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.

[figure description] Page 119.[end figure description]

“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 did n'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

[figure description] Page 120.[end figure description]

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 afterconduct
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.