ve with the place.
I wish I never had to leave it. There isn't a crook, or a turn, or a
tin-roof, or a dormer-window, or a gray stone in it that isn't
precious."

Mr. Arbuton laughed. "Well, you shall be sovereign lady of Quebec for
me. Shall we have the English garrison turned out?"

"No; not unless you can bring back Montcalm's men to take their places."

This might be as they sauntered out of one of the city gates, and
strayed through the Lower Town till they should chance upon some poor,
bare-interiored church, with a few humble worshippers adoring their
Saint, with his lamps alight before his picture; or as they passed some
high convent-wall, and caught the strange, metallic clang of the nuns'
voices singing their hymns within. Sometimes they whiled away the hours
on the Esplanade, breathing its pensive sentiment of neglect and
incipient decay, and pacing up and down over the turf athwart the slim
shadows of the poplars; or, with comfortable indifference to the local
observances, sat in talk on the carriage of one of the burly,
uncared-for guns, while the spider wove his web across the mortar's
mouth, and the grass nodded above the tumbled pyramids of shot, and the
children raced up and down, and the nursery-maids were wooed of the
dapper sergeants, and the red-coated sentry loitered lazily to and fro
before his box. On the days of the music, they listened to the band in
the Governor's Garden, and watched the fine world of the old capital in
flirtation with the blond-whiskered officers; and on pleasant nights
they mingled with the citizen throng that filled the Durham Terrace,
while the river shaped itself in the lights of its shipping, and the
Lower Town, with its lamps, lay, like a nether firmament, two hundred
feet below them, and Point Levis glittered and sparkled on the thither
shore, and in the northern sky the aurora throbbed in swift pulsations
of violet and crimson. They liked to climb the Break-Neck Steps at
Prescott Gate, dropping from the Upper to the Lower Town, which reminded
Mr. Arbuton of Naples and Trieste, and took Kitty with the unassociated
picturesqueness of their odd shops and taverns, and their lofty windows
green with house-plants. They would stop and look up at the geraniums
and fuchsias, and fall a thinking of far different things, and the
friendly, unbusy people would come to their doors and look up with them.
They recognized the handsome, blond young man, and the pretty, gray-eyed
gir