ere both puzzled when Kitty and Mr. Arbuton came towards them with
anxious faces. Kitty was painfully revolving in her mind what she had
just said, and thinking she had said not so much as she meant and yet so
much more, and tormenting herself with the fear that she had been at
once too bold and too meek in her demand for longer delay. Did it not
give him further claim upon her? Must it not have seemed a very
audacious thing? What right had she to make it, and how could she now
finally say no? Then the matter of her explanation to him: was it in the
least what she meant to say? Must it not give him an idea of
intellectual and spiritual poverty in her life which she knew had not
been in it? Would he not believe, in spite of her boasts, that she was
humiliated before him by a feeling of essential inferiority? O, _had_
she boasted? What she meant to do was just to make him understand
clearly what she was; but, had she? Could he be made to understand this
with what seemed his narrow conception of things outside of his own
experience? Was it worth while to try? Did she care enough for him to
make the effort desirable? Had she made it for his sake, or in the
interest of truth, merely, or in self-defence?

These and a thousand other like questions beset her the whole way home
to Quebec, amid the frequent pauses of the talk, and underneath whatever
she was saying. Half the time she answered yes or no to them, and not to
what Dick, or Fanny, or Mr. Arbuton had asked her; she was distraught
with their recurrence, as they teased about her like angry bees, and one
now and then settled, and stung and stung. Through the whole night, too,
they pursued her in dreams with pitiless iteration and fantastic change;
and at dawn she was awakened by voices calling up to her from the
Ursulines' Garden,--the slim, pale nun crying out, in a lamentable
accent, that all men were false and there was no shelter save the
convent or the grave, and the comfortable sister bemoaning herself that
on meagre days Madame de la Peltrie ate nothing but choke-cherries from
Chateau-Bigot.

Kitty rose and dressed herself, and sat at the window, and watched the
morning come into the garden below: first, a tremulous flush of the
heavens; then a rosy light on the silvery roofs and gables; then little
golden aisles among the lilacs and hollyhocks. The tiny flower-beds just
under her window were left, with their snap-dragons and larkspurs, in
dew and shadow; the smal