ht have stepped as they were out of any dull English novel. These
were talking in low voices and putting their hands to their ears to
catch the replies of the lady-passengers who hung upon the rail, and
twaddled back as dryly as if there was no moisture in life. All the
while the safety-valves hissed with the escaping steam, and the boat's
crew silently toiled with the grooms of the different horses to get the
equipages on board. With the carriages it was an affair of mere muscle,
but the horses required to be managed with brain. No sooner had one of
them placed his fore feet on the gangway plank than he protested by
backing up over a mass of patient Canadians, carrying with him half a
dozen grooms and deck-hands. Then his hood was drawn over his eyes, and
he was blindly walked up and down the pier, and back to the gangway,
which he knew as soon as he touched it. He pulled, he pranced, he shied,
he did all that a bad and stubborn horse can do, till at last a groom
mounted his back, a clump of deck-hands tugged at his bridle, and other
grooms, tenderly embracing him at different points, pushed, and he was
thus conveyed on board with mingled affection and ignominy. None of the
Canadians seemed amused by this; they regarded it with serious composure
as a fitting decorum, and Mr. Arbuton had no comment to make upon it.
But at the first embrace bestowed upon the horse by the grooms the
colonel said absently, "Ah! long-lost brother," and Kitty laughed; and
as the scruples of each brute were successively overcome, she helped to
give some grotesque interpretation to the various scenes of the
melodrama, while Mr. Arbuton stood beside her, and sheltered her with
his umbrella; and a spice of malice in her heart told her that he viewed
this drolling, and especially her part in it, with grave misgiving. That
gave the zest of transgression to her excess, mixed with dismay; for the
tricksy spirit in her was not a domineering spirit, but was easily
abashed by the moods of others. She ought not to have laughed at Dick's
speeches, she soon told herself, much less helped him on. She dreadfully
feared that she had done something indecorous, and she was pensive and
silent over it as she moved listlessly about after supper; and she sat
at last thinking in a dreary sort of perplexity on what had passed
during the day, which seemed a long one.

The shabby Englishman with his wife and sister were walking up and down
the cabin. By and by they sto