ou wouldn't mind if I spoke to you, and asked you in
to see the house. Most of the Americans stay long enough to visit the
citadel, and the Plains of Abraham, and the Falls at Montmorenci, and
then they go away. I should think they'd be tired always doing the same
things. To be sure, they're always different people."

It was unfair to let her entertainer go on talking for quantity in this
way; and Kitty said how glad she was to see the old Residence, and that
she should always be grateful to her for asking them in. She did not
disabuse her of her error; it cost less to leave it alone; and when Mr.
Arbuton reappeared, she took leave of those kind people with a sort of
remote enjoyment of the wife's mistakenness concerning herself. Yet, as
the young matron and her husband stood beside the carriage repeating
their adieux, she would fain have prolonged the parting forever, so much
she dreaded to be left alone with Mr. Arbuton. But, left alone with him,
her spirits violently rose; and as they drove along under the shadow of
the cliff, she descanted in her liveliest strain upon the various
interests of the way; she dwelt on the beauty of the wide, still river,
with the ships at anchor in it; she praised the lovely sunset-light on
the other shore; she commented lightly on the village, through which
they passed, with the open doors and the suppers frying on the great
stoves set into the partition-walls of each cleanly home; she made him
look at the two great stairways that climb the cliff from the
lumber-yards to the Plains of Abraham, and the army of laborers, each
with his empty dinner-pail in hand, scaling the once difficult heights
on their way home to the suburb of St. Roch; she did whatever she could
to keep the talk to herself and yet away from herself. Part of the way
the village was French and neat and pleasant, then it grovelled with
Irish people, and ceased to be a tolerable theme for discourse; and so
at last the silence against which she had battled fell upon them and
deepened like a spell that she could not break.

It would have been better for Mr. Arbuton's success just then if he had
not broken it. But failure was not within his reckoning; for he had so
long regarded this young girl _de haut en bas_, to say it brutally, that
he could not imagine she should feel any doubt in accepting him.
Moreover, a magnanimous sense of obligation mingled with his confident
love, for she must have known that he had overheard th