or
disliking anything she did, that she sat down at the piano, and sang a
number of songs, which I suppose were as unworthy the cultivated ear as
any he had heard. But though they were given with an untrained voice and
a touch as little skilled as might be, they pleased, or else the singer
pleased. The simple-hearted courage of the performance would alone have
made it charming; and Mr. Arbuton had no reason to ask himself how he
should like it in Boston, if he were married, and should hear it from
his wife there. Yet when a young man looks at a young girl or listens to
her, a thousand vagaries possess his mind,--formless imaginations,
lawless fancies. The question that presented itself remotely, like pain
in a dream, dissolved in the ripple of the singer's voice, and left his
revery the more luxuriously untroubled for having been.

He remembered, after saying good-night, that he had forgotten something:
it was to tell them he was going away.

VIII.

NEXT MORNING.

Quebec lay shining in the tender oblique light of the northern sun when
they passed next morning through the Upper Town market-place and took
their way towards Hope Gate, where they were to be met by the colonel a
little later. It is easy for the alert tourist to lose his course in
Quebec, and they, who were neither hurried nor heedful, went easily
astray. But the street into which they had wandered, if it did not lead
straight to Hope Gate, had many merits, and was very characteristic of
the city. Most of the houses on either hand were low structures of one
story, built heavily of stone or stuccoed brick, with two
dormer-windows, full of house-plants, in each roof; the doors were each
painted of a livelier color than the rest of the house, and each
glistened with a polished brass knob, a large brass knocker, or an
intricate bell-pull of the same resplendent metal, and a plate bearing
the owner's name and his professional title, which if not _avocat_ was
sure to be _notaire_, so well is Quebec supplied with those ministers of
the law. At the side of each house was a _porte-cochere_, and in this a
smaller door. The thresholds and doorsteps were covered with the neatest
and brightest oil-cloth; the wooden sidewalk was very clean, like the
steep, roughly paved street itself; and at the foot of the hill down
which it sloped was a breadth of the city wall, pierced for musketry,
and, past the corner of one of the houses, the half-length of cannon
showin