peated at appreciable intervals has to occur very
often before the unscientific mind will perceive the law of its
repetition. There was a little red-haired Englishman, John Gilby by
name, who travelled frequently that way. It was a good while before the
loungers at the station remarked that upon a certain day in the week he
always arrived by the local train and waited for the evening train to
take him on to Montreal. It was, in fact, Gilby himself who pointed out
to them the regularity of his visits, for he was of a social
disposition, and could not spend more than a few afternoons at that dull
isolated station without making friends with some one. He travelled for
a firm in Montreal; it was his business to make a circuit of certain
towns and villages in a certain time. He had no business at St. Armand,
but fate and the ill-adjusted time-table decreed that he should wait
there.

This little red-haired gentleman--for gentleman, in comparison with the
St. Armand folk he certainly was--was a thorough worldling in the sense
of knowing the world somewhat widely, and corresponding to its ways,
although not to its evil deeds. Indeed, he was a very good sort of man,
but such a worldling, with his thick gold chain, and jaunty clothes, and
quick way of adjusting himself to passing circumstances, that it was
some time before his good-natured sociableness won in the least upon
the station loungers. They held aloof, as from an explosive, not knowing
when it would begin to emit sparks. He was short in stature, much
shorter than the hulking fellows who stood and surveyed him through the
smoke of their pipes, but he had such a cocky little way with him that
he overawed them much more than a big man would have done. Out of sheer
dulness he took to talking to Zilda.

Zilda stood with her back against the wall.

'Fine day,' said Gilby, stopping beside her.

'Oui, monsieur.'

Gilby had taken his cigar from his mouth, and held it between two
fingers of his right hand. Her countrymen commonly held their pipes
between their thumb and finger. To Zilda, Gilby's method appeared
astonishingly elegant, but she hardly seemed to observe it.

'You have a flat country here,' said he, looking round at the dry summer
fields; 'rather dull, isn't it?'

'Oui, monsieur.'

'Don't you speak English?'

'Yes, sir,' said Zilda.

This was not very interesting for Gilby. He had about him a good deal of
the modern restlessness that cannot endure one ho