to go ashore in due order. Mr. Arbuton waited in a
slight anxiety to see whether the tipsy couple could repeat their
maneuver successfully on an upward incline; and they had just appeared
on the gangway, when he felt a hand passed carelessly and as if
unconsciously through his arm, and at the same moment a voice said,
"Those are a pair of disappointed lovers, I suppose."

He looked round and perceived the young lady of the party he had made up
his mind to have nothing to do with resting one hand on the rail, and
sustaining herself with the other passed through his arm, while she was
altogether intent upon the scene below. The ex-military gentleman, the
head of the party, and apparently her kinsman, had stepped aside without
her knowing, and she had unwittingly taken Mr. Arbuton's arm. So much
was clear to him, but what he was to do was not so plain. It did not
seem quite his place to tell her of her mistake, and yet it seemed a
piece of unfairness not to do so. To leave the matter alone, however,
was the simplest, safest, and pleasantest; for the pressure of the
pretty figure lightly thrown upon his arm had something agreeably
confiding and appealing in it. So he waited till the young lady, turning
to him for some response, discovered her error, and disengaged herself
with a face of mingled horror and amusement. Even then he had no
inspiration. To speak of the mistake in tones of compliment would have
been grossly out of place; an explanation was needless; and to her
murmured excuses, he could only bow silently. She flitted into the
cabin, and he walked away, leaving the Indians to stagger ashore as they
might. His arm seemed still to sustain that elastic weight, and a voice
haunted his ear with the words, "A pair of disappointed lovers, I
suppose"; and still more awkward and stupid he felt his own part in the
affair to be; though at the same time he was not without some obscure
resentment of the young girl's mistake as an intrusion upon him.

It was late twilight when the boat reached Tadoussac, and ran into a
sheltered cove under the shadow of uplands on which a quaint village
perched and dispersed itself on a country road in summer cottages; above
these in turn rose loftier heights of barren sand or rock, with here and
there a rank of sickly pines dying along their sterility. It had been
harsh and cold all day when the boat moved, for it was running full in
the face of the northeast; the river had widened almost to a