for the
picnic were complete and the four set off together in one carriage. In
the strong need that was on each of them to make the best of the affair,
the colonel's unconsciousness might have been a little overdone, but
Mrs. Ellison's demeanor was sublimely successful. The situation gave
full play to her peculiar genius, and you could not have said that any
act of hers failed to contribute to the perfection of her design, that
any tone or speech was too highly colored. Mr. Arbuton, of whom she took
possession, and who knew that she knew all, felt that he had never done
justice to her, and seconded her efforts with something like cordial
admiration; while Kitty, with certain grateful looks and aversions of
the face, paid an ardent homage to her strokes of tact, and after a few
miserable moments, in which her nightlong trouble gnawed at her heart,
began, in spite of herself, to enjoy the humor of the situation.

It is a lovely road out to Chateau-Bigot. First you drive through the
ancient suburbs of the Lower Town, and then you mount the smooth, hard
highway, between pretty country-houses, toward the village of
Charlesbourg, while Quebec shows, to your casual backward-glance, like a
wondrous painted scene, with the spires and lofty roofs of the Upper
Town, and the long, irregular wall wandering on the verge of the cliff;
then the thronging gables and chimneys of St. Roch, and again many
spires and convent walls; lastly the shipping in the St. Charles, which,
in one direction, runs, a narrowing gleam, up into its valley, and in
the other widens into the broad light of the St. Lawrence. Quiet, elmy
spaces of meadow land stretch between the suburban mansions and the
village of Charlesbourg, where the driver reassured himself as to his
route from the group of idlers on the platform before the church. Then
he struck off on a country road, and presently turned from this again
into a lane that grew rougher and rougher, till at last it lapsed to a
mere cart-track among the woods, where the rich, strong odors of the
pine, and of the wild herbs bruised under the wheels, filled the air. A
peasant and his black-eyed, open-mouthed boy were cutting withes to bind
hay at the side of the track, and the latter consented to show the
strangers to the chateau from a point beyond which they could not go
with the carriage. There the small habitant and the driver took up the
picnic-baskets, and led the way through pathless growths of underbrush