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Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la mdthode. rrata o lelure. 3 32X 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 I AUl / A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE BY MARIAN C. L. REEVES AUTHOR OF "OLD MAUTIN BOSCAWEN's JEST," ETC. CoR.-And how like yoii tliis shepherd's life Master Touchstone ? ' Toucu.-Truly, shepherd, in respect of it- self, It is a Rood life ; but in respec. that it is a ehepherd'slife. it is nauRht In respect It 18 in the nelds, it pleasefh me well ; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. As You Like It. NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPAKY 1888 I i Copyhioht, 1888, Bv D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. I A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. "... In the hollow by the stream That beach leans down into, of which you said The Oread in it ha.s a Naiad's heart, And pines for waters." A STONY hollow, down among the hills. The Tery spot where, when at the creation rock and earth were being sown broadcast over the face of the globe, the rocks wore through the bottom of the sack that held them, trickling thick ».nd fast i^ a gray stream that frets the brown little mount- l^n river hurrying to the St. John. I A spot wild and antrodden since that day, one Blight have said ; but for the bleaching skeletons of trees that bristle up the slopes, and tell where himbcr-camps have been, and gone. Young trees aiid alders and tall ferns are trying fast to cover Ijtp the havoc these have made ; and where they uster closest, the stream broadens out, giving A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. I buijbling promise of a sliiillow ford, so clear as it runs over the pebbles. A promise "vviiich old Dobbin, wiser than lii^ rider, knew better than to trust ; for lie maile what protest he could, sidling on the margin, be- fore ho went floundering into a treacherous pot»l midway. As Dr. Kendal pulled him up rathtr roughly, having taken more water than he likcMl. a peal of mocking laughter rang out, up-stream. Now, to be mounted on a sorry nag is quite mortification enough to a good horseman, without the added aggravation of providing amusemoti: for a by-stander — in search of whom, Kemhii turned half angrily in his saddle, and caugli: sight of a gray something drifting with the twi- light shadows half-way across the water. So dim was it, amid those shadows, that i: might almost be mistaken for the evening mi.v- crous pool lip rather L he liked, ip-strcam. xg is quit* 111, without amusement m, Kcml^ii and can pi It ilh the twi- er. )ws, that i. ening mi>t fcious watci' her reeds in" lip, she saw he )f a practice les. had flitto in the tree: f minded t \ LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 5 ride after, and demand why she had left him to flounder through the water Iiere, while she could liave given a liint of the ford above ? However, tliere was something she Iiad shown liim, whether she would or no : the opening throui^h the wood, which elsewhere closed in, im])enetrubly thick and matted. Kendal had ridden down into ihe hollow, •beckoned l)y a thin wave of chimney-smoke from •the house to which he had been called to visit a Aiivw patient. A starveling signal, to be flung out from the ligh-sounding De Landremont homestead. But p^endal had been long enough in the Madawaska region to look for nothing on a larger scale than the trim cottages of the hahitans. With their jquaintly sloping whitewashed roofs sol in ruddy .})uckwheat patches, or yellowing strips of late- J^ipening grain, they spread along the natural lerraces of the river St. John, and up into the fkirts of i\\Q forest, whither the old Acadians fled, ^ century ago ; or such among the old Acadians, Jlvangeline's compatriots, as happily escaped the lEnglish ships that would have carried them into (|xile. In this safe refuge, on the summer farms i^r in the winter lumber-camps, the years went by : |a Acadie, as the habitans dreamed, until one day Ipiey woke, and found that Maine had reached t her boundary-line, and drawn some of them 1(1 6 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. in just here. On each side of tliat line, somc- timenimacfinary, sometimes the clear, broad, twist- ini,' band of the St. John, the old Acadian fami- lies remain, one half ** American," one half pro- vincial, both halves wholly French ; thouf,di will- ingly enough making room among themselves for an outsider such as Dr. Kendal. lie meanwhile had reached the gap where his unwitting guide had vanished ; pushed his way along the path on which the alders trespassed ; and emerged on a wide open space ^\;hich might once have been garden, but where uow scrub spruce and firs were straggling, and sumac thrust its coarse red pompons in the stead of flowers. In the midst, a rambling cottage, larger than tlio wont, but gray and leaning to decay, and with that niggardly line of smoke wavering above. It was the one sign of occupancy about the place ; so Kendal followed it, flinging his bridle over a half-sunken gate-post — gate there was none — and crossing the furze-grown, wood-littered yard to the door. His knock was unanswered. But the line of windows with that gaunt and hollow-eyed look which the want of curtains always gives, offered him no encouragement to try farther on. Tlic chimney-smoke was at least something promis- ing ; so, after a moment's hesitation, he lifted the latch. iroi I A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. C, Bomc- id, twist- iiin fumi- liiilf pro- ut 3f flowers. ;r than the , and with above, about the his bridle re was none ttcrcd yard the line of v-eycd look ivcs, offertHl :;r on. Tiic ing promi.^- he lifted tht It was a long, low-raftcrcd kitchen into which he was invited bv tlie firelight. The llanies went dancing about a row of tins on the tall dresser- shelves ; catching at the jmlishcd circle of the spin- ning-wheel, and the high wooden settle against the wall ; glancing over at the brasses of a credence , an old-fashioned press, just opposite ; thence slink- ing back behind the black pot hung in the great roomy chimney, and flickering out again with brightening touches upon what Kendal only just then caught sight of. A fair head half turned his wav, witli startled poise, a small gray figure seated on the hearth. Kothing misty nor naiad-likc, here, but only I a very earthly little girl ; to whom, however, Ken- dal straightway went up, and said — in English due to the fair hair : ** Water-witches don't care for a fire; so you'll not mind my taking this from you, as I was not prepared for that plunge in the stream ? " ^ lie had taken his stand on the hearth before f her, leaning against the side of the wide chimney : a rather massive, dark-bearded man, twisting his riding-whip in a pair of vigorous, ungloved hands, and looking down on her with a twinkle in his deep-set gray eyes. Her color deepened ; she shifted her position, fronting him more directly, her elbows on her A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. knees, her chin in her two little brown hands, her blue eyes sparkling defiance up at him. When that movement was all the answer he had— *'Do you not understand ?" he said, this time in French. " Oui, 'coniprends," she returned indifferently, settling herself into her old ])osition. "What had I done, that you should give mc no hint of the ford ? " *' What had you done, that I should give you any hint of it ?" She said it with such directness, such certainty of unanswerableness in the cold, sweet voice, that Kendal rather stared at lier, taken by surprise as when one would touch a rose, and finds it tinted marble instead. How had she come by that fair little, sunny- haired face, the big childish blue eyes that ought to have had the sunshine in them too, but had only an unchildlike hardness instead ? Kendal had nothing to say, for an instant ; and then the pause was broken by the opening of an inner door. "Oh, but that is fine ! on a summer evenin^r like this, to burn up all the wood my vierC huomme Pacifique has cut for madame's fire up- stairs ! " The brisk old body on the threshold, her 'hite- on, i] find that oent i A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. » ids, her iwcr he lis time :crcntly» give me give you certainty oice, that surprise I finds it le, sunny- hat ought hut had Kendal then the an inner ler evening my viert' [e's fire up- Lher 'hitc- kerchiefed ljo>oni Hwelling with indignation at tlic reckless extravagance of tlie lire, lier crest of a wiiite cap bristling, lier sharp little face thrust ' forward, like an angry hen that finds her ne.st meddled with — had taken no note of the stranger. ' Until the giil said, with a careless shrug : * **I have burned a bc'aut6 of your wood ; that lis because you left me no candle. Use the one tin your hand, tanto Marguite, and fico we have a Ivisitor." Tante Marguitc came hastily fo'^Mard, with a [uick change of tone, a ring of ri 'icf iii it. " Eh, it is monsieur the d 'ctor ?" * Yes, I am Dr. Kcridal. 1 recei ved your mes- sage— »> She had turned to the girl : **Go, then, tell madame I urn showing mon- sieur the doctor up." The girl rose, as of habit, at tlie ]ieromptory order ; but lingeringly, in a surprised way, with an evident desire to hear more. But not a word more was added, until the door had closed on her. Then : ''Listen a little, monsieur," the woman went on, in her provincial Frencli, "I fear you will find madame failing fast. It is, however, true tliat she is near as young as me " ; with a compla- oent drawing up of her own alert, round figure. 10 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. I "But as Pacifique (that is my man, monsieur, that was gardener here, when there was anybody to see a garden !) tells me only yesterday, peonies and those common things are well more hardy than the dainty flowers one puts in the vase in the salon. But monsieur will come and judge for himself." Kendal was a little impatient to do so ; but she detained him to explain that le Bon Dieu had brought him to the neighborhood just in time. For if madame's illness had been but two weeks earlier, while the old doctor was yet alive, and Dr. Kendal had not come down from Riviere du Loup to fill his place, what a misfortune ! For madame would not have sent for the old doctor, at any price ; not since he had taken upon him- self to speak to her about monsieur Jean, just after monsieur Fran9ois turned his back once for all on the old home. And if monsieur the doc- tor is to do madame any good now, he will have the kindness to remember she has never spoken of the old story, nor heard those two names, for it's many and many a year. **You need not fear," Kendal interposed, good-naturedly. "The less, that I know noth- ing of the old story, and hear the names for the first time from your own lips." Marguite looked rather crestfallen than re- lieved that gossip did not busy itself about tlit |Bnn .|)asi too I I Mil hcroi A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIB. 11 lonsieur, anybody , peonies re hardy 3 vase in ad judge so; but Dieu had 5 in time, two weelis alive, and Riviere du une 1 For old doctor, upon him- Jean, just ok once for ar the doc- e will have ever spoken ) names, for interposed, know notli- ames for the len than re De Landremont house. But she was prompt to say, somewhat stiffly indeed : " So much the better ; for there's no getting anything out of a bag but what's in it. This way, then, if monsieur pleases." But Kendal could catch a murmur now and then, as she lighted him np-stairs : "Truly I and he in the village two whole I weeks ! And to think all the world could forget I that little history ! But, all the same, le Bon I Dieu has brought him just in time, in place of I the old one." % Kendal smiled rather grimly. If she thought Uhe death of his predecessor providential, what > would she think of that episode in Kendal's own "life, which had more or less remotely brought about his being here, in the stead of the medical adviser madame would not lijrve sent for ? The sound of footsteps on the stairs must have announced them ; for as the two reached the land- ing, a door was opened by the girl, who flitted j)ast without speaking, and they entered the "loom. Kendal's expectations, on the basis of so ii^nch of the house as he had already seen, were at fault ^ere. It was as if all thot the other rooms had iver known of quaint anu massive, in the way of ^Id mahogany, had marshaled themselves about ilf about tlv ^G mistress antiquated as they. In the light of « 12 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. the silver candelabrum on the stand at her elbow, she was glancing up at her visitor, out of a pinched white face ; all the more white and waxen for the startling contrast with the black silk kerchief tied three-corner-wise over her silvery hair. It gave her the look of a religieuse ; a look flatly contra- dicted by the quick, vivacious eyes — " Coal coal black, and they're like a hawk, And they winna let a body be," said Kendal to himself, while she was welcomin*]^ him in French much older than herself : " Dr. Kendal, is it not ? I am charmed to see you ; though perhaps you may think my send- ing for you a mere trap to catch a visitor ? Tlic truth is, my good Marguerite here — " A smile of friendly understanding passed be- tween mistress and maid, as the latter softly witli- drew from the room. " My good Marguerite will have it that I am not quite strong this summer ; and so, as I am entirely dependent on her for companionship, 1 find it wisest not to dispute on the point of ii needle, and am a little ill accordingly," Kendal looked at her in some doubt as to how much of the cheerful tone was real, how mncl, assumed. To him, the first light touch of deal! was so apparent in the delicate, pinched feature-. I ■I ^roi ft A LITTLE MAID OF AGADIE. 13 jr elbow, pinched a for the jhief tied It gave y contra- k, welcoming E: iharmed to ik my sciul- itor? The passed 1)C- softly witli- that I am so, as I am anionsliip, 1 B point of a ibt as to ho^ , how miul )uch of dculi hcd feature^ • tluit he must think she had at least felt the ap- proach of the cold hand. lie watched her with tlie interest we are wont to feel in one who is, we see, well-nigh f.ice to face with the mysteries of that strange, hidden world. But to those keen old eyes there were no mysteries ; and not much of a world outside the four walls of this chamber of hers. ,. *' I do not know to what will serve your pow- iders, Dr. Kendal," she said to him, tapping with ^ transparent hand certain tiny folded papers his I saddle-bags had furnished forth, when nearly an hour later he had risen to go ; " but I am sure your visit has been of benefit. You will always be the welcome monsieur, as often as you may spare an hour for an old woman — a spjJtante who has been out of the world a good many years .^already. For me, I commence to believe," she added, graciously, **I have been in error, since a long time, in so shutting all young companion- ehip out of my life, that I forgot it could interest me — until you came." Young companionship ! Kendal was smiling to himself over the words, as he went out. They had an odd sound in them, applied to jhimself. A man's age is not always to be computed from the entry of his birth in the family Bible. It was now some years since Kendal had believed \ n rrr 14 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. ! i his youth as completely ended as if he were verging on the threescore years and ten of the old lady up- stairs. Yes, youth and he had parted company ; he did not know that he should desire a meeting again. It was well over ; he had no more wish to bring it back, with its feverish moods, than to risk having again the scarlet fever, or anything else incident to one^s early days. Perhaps if what he called his middle-age had been even as much as the precise middle of the allotted threescore years and ten ; or had brought with it any other physical sign than an added breadth of shoulder : in other words, if youth had passed so far away from him, as to be beyond glancing over her shoulder at him as she went — he might have reached out eagerly after the mere retreating shadow. As it was, he was conscious of a faint, pleasurable amusement at Mme. de Landremont's odd mistake — a feeling which left him no time to wonder that, in speaking of young companion- ship, she should keep no note of the girl down- stairs. He was the more taken by surprise when, at an angle in the stairs, the girl stopped him, start- ing up suddenly from her seat on a lower step. " Tell me, is she ill — my grandmother ? You are a doctor : tell me, will she — will she die 9 " '* Your grandmother ? " He repeated the words almost incredulously. •'<"M^ #'aw illl iUki lyh] «itht II!! : A LITTLE MAID OF AOADIE. IS e verging I lady up- ompany ; 1 meeting nore wish s, than to anything ,ps if what n as much threescore any other ' ' shoulder : far away rr over her night have retreating of a faint, ndremont's m no time companion- girl down- se when, at him, start- wer step. >ther? You ihe die 9 " epeated the She never heeded. She stood in the moon- alight slanting in at the window behind her, and lifted to him a pale, determined face that would not be trifled with. " Vill she fZie r' The voice sank to a frightened whisper, ap- pealing to him as if he had only to open his lips and pronounce for death oi reprieve. Perhaps she interpreted his grave smile too hopefully, as he said : B " She is not ill. Perhaps she may never bo ^1. She is old ; the sands are running low, the threescore years and ten are almost spent. I think you will one day be glad, if you can brighten the brief while that is left ; can cheer with your com- panionship — " " My companionship — my companionship ! " She broke in with a short, hard laugh ; so bitter, that involuntarily he drew a step nearer her. At that she recovered herself, with a haughty drawing up of the small figure, and looked him fall in the face. " You don't know what you are talking about — " she said, insolently ; and went by him like a flash. Kendal descended, feeling, as he told himself, rather more hot and angry than was worth while itt a child's impertinence — a child, a mere frac- tion of youth, which apparently did not count i!fr 1 1 ill * t'< IG A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. in the summing up of the inmates of the old house. And how soon would Death's summons come, to lessen the number yet more ? The utmost Kendal could hope to do, would be to bar the door against it for a very little while. Do 01 n, kid i 4 II. "... the slow door That, opening, letting in, Ic 3 out no more." J and aDgI( The summons was nearer than Kendal knew crcati Tie had but paid two or three visits more tilonc made welcome by the gracious old lady, but set wav i ing nothing of the girl, save a gray shadow vai: gKnir ishing among the trees. T When one midnight, came old Pacifiqui Land hurrying with so urgent a message, that Dr b0ten Kendal, as he threw himself into his saddle ^on( feared Death on the Pale Horse would rcac Tf madame's door before him. Bat si And so, indeed, it proved. bed ; When Kendal — better mounted than in Do:o^sso| bin's day, and therefore easily distancing Pac 4 Til fique — had dismounted, and made his way acroJ||nd[ A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 17 f the old ions come, ho utmost to bar the slow door more." |he littered yard to the house, he nearly stumbled jpver a small figure crouching on the door-step. I So small a figure — so desolate out there in tbo i^ark, with head dropped on its knees — that it is no wonder the man was moved, as one is easily by a cliild's trouble. And seeing that her sob- bing made her deaf to his approach, he gently Ipjd his hand upon the drooping head. > **Come in with m^^ —I will take you to her," lie said. lie could feel the shudder that shook her from head to foot. She slipped from under his hand, and the next instant she was gone, beyond the augle of the house. This was no fitting time to give the wayward [cndal knew, creature a thought more. Yet it may be ques- visits more tionec' whether Kendal did not, as he made his ady but set way up through the empty house, guided by the shadow viu. gKmmer of a light placed on the landing. There was a farther glimmer across Mme. de d Pacifiq^^' Landremont's threshold. Marguite must have crc that Ur bften on the watch for him, for she opened to him his sadilli i^once, quietly as he came, would rcat The sharp old face was blurred with tears. But she did not speak until he had bent over the bed ; then reverently replaced the waxen hand than in Po otbssed on the quiet breast. stancing riKjB*^^® woman moved to a window apart, and acioJipndal followed her ; both with the stedthy 2 I his way 18 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. ilhH ii liliM tread which one falls into in the death-chamber:! as if one feared disturbing that one sleeper whom| no jarring sound can ever again trouble. "I suppose, from what your husband told mc, ^ it was too sudden to liave sent for me earlier," said Kendal, speaking in a suppressed voiced " Had it even been otherwise, I could hardly -j have done anything. It might be some relief to you, perhaps," he added, after a pause, lookini: kindly at the old face with the painful tears o: age upon it, ^*if I were to take on me some o! the arrangements now ? That is to say, if tlicr is no proper friend within reach to do it, as ;ii' pears to be the case." " If monsieur would have the goodness ? Si then, my old Pacifique, he does of the best whicl he knows ; but he'd be coming to ask me aboi: everything ; which is what I could not bca: though mostly I do like it well," she added, car didly. "Now, monsieur would understand wh; is fitting. He bien, it is everything of the be: that is fitting. There is no need to stint tl. money ; she that is gone had enough and t |am spare, for all she chose to live here in this loii some way, with just us two to care for her." ''And mademoiselle ?" put in Kendal, witli remembrance of the lonely little figure on t: door-steps. *' Oui-dil ! Mamselle Fran9uaise ! " Vi i\ b] ea to ^h( p; liei |her ^•ie Js I J)03 l( eta *ej', A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIK. 10 i-ch amber : cpcr whom 0. lid told mc, tnc earlier,'' }sscd Toice, )uld hardly ,me relief to ,usc, lookin,:: ifal tears oi mc some oi say, if thev do it, as ap- There was a sort of contemptuous snort in the ^ words — checked, however, by a glance toward "': the bed, wliere no unseemly sound could come to break that rest. Kendal, still thinking of the lonely child, was Baying : odness ? Set, he best whicl ask me aboir Jd not bear le added, can ierstand wlia g of the bes; to stint tl: ,ough and i e in this Ion for her." iendal, witl figure on t it se I !»> And those who should bo notified ? It ought ;to be done at once." |- " There is no one, monsieur. No one knows, these years and years, where monsieur Frangois ■is ; and all the rest of her family have gone before her. All but Madame Jean's ; if you call that her family ! Madame Jean is in Europe : better friends at a distance than enemies near, sav I. It |s my old man and me who will accompany her to the grave. And mamsclle Fran^uaiso, sup- )os — " she added, as an after-thought. "Mamsclle Franguaise, of course. And this Ladame Jean ? " "Is her son's widow, monsieur must undcr- band. Sec a little, I will fetch monsieur her let- jr, which reached madame the day monsieur first ime to see her. She bade me put it away here HI the secretaire. * It has directions enough for a daily correspondence, ma bonne Marguite,' she said to me. ' The woman might know it imports Bae nothing, how she may run cackling over a whole continent, with her brood at her heels ; ine of them may pick up a prince's feather some- gi • i I I so A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. i i where as they go, but ifc can import nothing to f me. f >> She repeated her dead mistress's speech, "W'itli evident satisfaction in it, before she added for herself : *' I'd be beholden to monsieur if he wonlil have the goodness to write instead of me. For, tlie pen once in my hand, one good time for all, there's things would get themselves written down on the paper — do I not know it, I who speak ? Figure to yourself, monsieur, it would be as much as my place is worth." Kendal had opened the thin sheet of foreign paper she had given him, and was jotting down the address at the top of the page. ** Just Madame Jean, monsieur : her family ij all. Except the neighbors. They came willingly enough to the old house, in the days when it wa- the best known of all around for gay doings: may be they'll not mind coming yet one time, i: only to see the changes the long years have brought about. For it is years and years si net monsieur Jean made that marriage that turiici; madame so bitter against him ; and reason gooa too ! " It was not just the moment to be interested i: a match of yeafs and years ago ; and though cur: osity, man to the contrary notwithstanding, is. not unmanly failing, Kendal did not pursue tli to hi Wife boy I If si J'ail selk He, on }J m A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 91 lothing to eecli, with added for he would me. For, me for all, •itten down rlio speak ? be as miuh it of forci.un itting down ler family i; me willingly when it wa? gay doings: one time, i: years havi . years sine-; that turnc'i reason good ! interested i: . though cur standing, is )t pursue til subject. lie was folding up the letter, when Mar- guite stopped him. ** If it pleases monsieur to take it ? It is neces- sary to read it. There's nothing in it that the whole village does not know — or did before they forgot," she added, resentfully. *' There's moro than one direction in it, see you, monsieur ; they're running about so over yonder countries — one date for a letter to get to her at such a town, and an- other at another, bon?ie chance ! 'Tis but little ehe need liave i)ut herself to the trouble to set ihcm down for my poor mistress ; if she yet lived, 'tis little of a letter Madame Jean need look for. But I suppose it's proper now." *' Most certainly." Kendal was putting the letter into his pocket-book. "And about made- moiselle FranQuaise ? This Madame Jean is her aunt?" " Ilcr auut ! But that is just what she ought to have been — that is to say, monsieur Francois's wife, since she was first promised to him, poor boy ! Ah, he'd never have gone wrong as he did, if she had not thrown him over for his brother! Faites excuse, monsieur ; Madame Jean is Mam- selle Franguaise's mother." Kendal felt a quick sense of relief, as if the lit- tle, impracticable thing had weighed more heavily n him than was needful. " Her mother ? I am glad to hear that." 22 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. ill i 1 iiiiil ill; I 'I *' Arc you so, monsieur ?" was old ^larguitc's interpolation, with a toss of tiic head, like a charger snufllng the battle afar. "I found the child out on the door-step, cry- ing fit to break lier heart," he went on. " Do not let her be too much .ilone. The young need a helping hand to ease the burden of their sorrow for them." He missed the muttered "Ouais! Mamsello Fran(;uai.se will never break her heart under that burden ! " For he had gone out, with that same hushed step, and a reverent farewell glance across at tiu' upturned face on the pillow — the fair old facv that he would see uo more. • For the girl, he saw nothing of her as he went down- stairs. Out of doors, the dubious gray dawn was confus- ing everything, until Kendal had almost reachcil his horse, when something moved beyond it. It was FrauQoise, her head bowed down on tlie arm she had flung across the creature's neck, in a sort of dumb appeal for the companionship of some living thing, in this first hour of her contact with death. But it must bo some living thing which would leave her free from question or from scrutiny. For when she heard Kendal's step, she started up and went past him, without speaking. ^% to A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 23 Marguitc's }ad, like a ir-stcp, crv- . '*Doiiot ing need a heir sorrow I Mamsello under that ime liiishcd jross at till' lir old face .' us he went | was con f us- | lost reachtd ond it. own on the s neck, in a n ion ship of her contact V hich would crutiny. she started ing. III. "Life treads on life, nnd heart on heart — We press too close, in chureh or mart, To keep a dream or grave apart." "Mamselle Fuax^oise, of course," Kendal had repeated, when Marguitc was counting on her mistress's followers to the grave. But she had somewhat miscounted, as it [proved. TI ' hour came when the funeral procession was to start for the village church, hut Franyoisc was nowhere to he found. So, after all, the two old servitors fell into |])laec as chief mourners ; rightful place, as they jbotli evidently thought it. There was plenty of honorable observance in [the gathered throng of fideks ; but never a tear to fall on the heaped-up mold, save those few dropping slowly and bitterly from Marguite's eyes, as she clutched the arm of her more phleg- matic spouse, with a pressure which even in her distress was intended to convey to him her sense that he was not doing his full duty to the occa- Bion, by standing there dry-eyed. But when Kendal came by the churchyard again, in the early twilight, he was not surprised to find the girl sitting in the shadow of the great black cross which towered in the midst of the m ■|pMMM>-»At^u>A4.. »»> -^y-ritoM 24 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. I '( i'!' ri! Mi graves, its arms spanned by the white circle, em- blem of eternity. She was in her usual listless attitude, her el- bows in her lap, her chin propped in her two hands. She did not move, except to put up an injpatient shoulder, when she heard the stir of some one coming to her through the long grass ; and she said petulantly, and without looking round : "You needn't mind mc, tante Marguite. I'm not going home yet — I don't want any supi)cr." There was a strained sound in the voice ; and Kendal caught the gleam of tears in the eyes which persistently, as if to hold back the drops from falling, fixed themselves upon the wooded line of the horizon. He saw her start as if she knew him without looking directly at him, and he said, gently : ** You must not send me away quite at once. I have ridden far to have a moment's talk with you." "Ah, 9a I I know what you are going to say !" Again she put up her shoulder, with that same impatient gesture. "It is hardly worth the pain, however. I have my suffisance of it ; tante Mar- guite has been preaching at me in good time, from the same text. Two heads in one cap, you two, monsieur ; but, all the two, you will never make me sorry that I stole away and hid myself this morning, instead of joining in the triumphal «i A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 25 si^cle, em- de, her el- n lier two put up an the stir of ong grass; at looking guitc. I'm supper." voice ; and n the eyes k the drops the wooded bt as if she Lt him, and at once. I V with you." ng to say ! " 1 that same th the pain, tante Mar- good time, »ne cap, you will never hid myself e triumphal , procession to lay her away in tlie grave. As if, '' even if she knew, she would care that I— that / was near her ! " It was ratlier a gasp than a sob, which broke , tlic voice. And then slie turned on him, in a sort of breathless defiance of her own emotion. But he only took liis seat quietly on the slop- ing ground at her feet, half-averted from lier, and ^letting liis gaze rest, as had hers, on the new mound Ma stone's-throw ofp. It was already marked, as ^the majority of those around, with a cross about itwo feet high, neatly covered witli black muslin Istitched over it ; on which was also sutched, in lletters of white tape : I ns 1 cigit Venerente de Landremont a e e 71. H. T. P. '!'1S ^''ii!ii I I > m ill teii ['■ . I 'l':l ;i!h!i 2G A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. Kondal glanced at the girl's face, from tlie cross ; and he easily guessed who had planted it there. But he made no comment. The moon was beginning to glimmer silvery through the gray dusk ; the woodland stir came to them like a sigh. Kendal left time enough fur the calm to quiet her, before he spoke ; even then, rather to himself than to her : "I have often thought the greatest marvel of the other world is the different view of this one, which must flash upon our suddenly '^Icar-seeiii:: eyes. To behold the things we have red most for in our daily life, the little comfort.^' and habits, dwindled to a mere speck of valley-dust blown oH from us upon our heights ; and the love, the very vital air we breathe, the one thing that mount; with us — " She put up her hand hurriedly to stop him. "I understand you; you suppose it woiiltl comfort me to believe that grandmamma, thoiidi here she never thought about my love, would .^c great price on it fherc. Bat you are mistake: from beginning to end. I never loved grand mamma." She said it in a bitterly shamed way, sink in. her head as if humiliated by the confession. Bii she spoke it out bravely, as repelling the dislioii' h( fil( ■ A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 27 from the planted it mcr silvery 1 stir came enougli for lokc ; even st marvel of of this one, plear-scein? .red most ^' and habits, .ist blown Oil ovc, the very uit moiinb: dly to stop CO it woiiltl nma, thougli vc, would SCI are mistiikei loved gruiul way, sink in: fession. Bu' (T the dishoD' csty of claiming credit for something she did not deserve. Kendal heard her in surprise. And her agony of suspense on the night of his first visit, wlien she stopped liim on the stairs ; her sobs out in the night of death ; her hopeless attitude just now ? *'' I suppose you have felt it hard to be kept here, away from your own mother," he said in the pause, half involuntarily, trying to solve the prob- lem for himself. Down went the fair head, lower 3'et. *'Nor my mother, either. Why should you trouble about me, Ur. Kendal ? I am not worth your while. I am not a good girl. As tante IMarguite says, I have the chamr dur. I don't love any one at all." *' Poor child ! poor little Franyoisc ! " She lifted her head from her hands and looked at him. I He was not looking at her, as he sat there at tier feet ; his dark, strongly marked face in pro- file, his eyes again on tlie horizon-line. There was nothing to startle the girl in such words from him. She would never have made that mistake of the grandmother's about 'lis young companionship. 4 She watched him a moment in silence ; and |hcu — ||; .| ! l l^ 28 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. l;l|< Hi "I think you must be like Uncle Frank," slio said, wistfully. ** Not in face — I don't mean that — he was blond, like me. That is why they gave me his name, because we were so much alike." *'His name ?" Her glance had wandered again, absently fol- lowing the breeze as it freshened in the waves of grass, and here and there flung out the spray of daisies or foam-drift of immortelles. Turned aside so, she missed the sudden keen and searching look which, without changing his position, Kendal had fixed on her as she answered : " Mais oui, his name. Fran9oise was as near as they could give a girl, of course ; but then I was always called Frank^j as a little one in the family." *^ Madame Jean's family?" Kendal said, in- voluntarily quoting tante Marguite. The girl colored a little. " But yes, certainly. We were living in Liv- erpool then ; we spoke the English altogether there ; that is not to say I have not forgotten much since then. My undo Fran9ois wai Frank—" The searching look intensified, as if Kenda! were seeking something in the unconscious faet which had not struck him before — somethin:: M A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 20 Frank," sho ion't mean is why they re so much absently fol- the waves of the spray of sudden keen it changing her as she } was as near 1; but then 1 e one in the idal said, in- living in Liv- sh altogether lot forgotten 'ran 901s wa.- as if Kenda! Conscious face — something which he was by no means sure he had found even now. And yet — " Frank Latour ?" he said, witli a questionij]g inflection. "Xo, but De Landromont, monsieur under- Btands. Eh, then, I had almost forgotten ; it is rran9ois La Tour de Landremont, for a daughter of La Tour was wife to a De Landremont in the early days of Acadie. But my uncle Franyois was just Frank with us in England ; and I was Frank. I can just remember ; and Jiow Marie would always call me so — and papa. Mamma never did ; she — " There she checked herself abruptly. Slie glanced at Kendal with hurried inquiry in her l>3'es. IIow much had slie said ? — too much ? But the utter absence of curiosity in his face and attitude reassured her. She did not perceive that he was listening with an intentncss deeper than mere curiosity, and that might have suggested a stronger interest in this Frank Latour — de Landremont — than an unfamiliar name awakens. No one could tell the relief it was to her to speak. The strange hush she had been kept in for days was appalling to her. There was some- thing comforting in going back into the past, with some one who would see nothing more in it tban she had while she lived it. Afterward, 30 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. i lljjjjjj.il ^ iif i!'l I'; tante luarguite had let fall enough to her to take all the pleasure out of it. To tante Marguite she could never have made any reference to it again. I3ut it was different with Kendal, who would not see anything but the obvious outside. So she went on : ^' I can just remember the time before I came here ; the big house outside of Liverpool, with its great gardens ; and the holiday journeyings now and then to strange foreign places. For papa never returned here after his marriage. And when he had made, oh, quantitu in money, by lum- ber and ship-building, first in St. John, and then in Liverpool, he would take us traveling. That is not the way the sons do here, 3"ou know," slio said, more gravely, as if confessing to heterodox proceedings. *' They settle aiiror dc leurs pen^, with here a strip and there a strip cut off the home-farm, and a little house built on it as each marries. There was a little house built on tlic other end of the farm here, for Uncle Frank — " She broke off hastily. " Only, he did not marry. But those old days — those journeyings — it is all a dream, but a dream one likes to think of, when one wakes." " One should have more years than yours, to care to dream of the past," Kendal said, hastily. At your age — " " I was nearly nine years old. Of course, it a lip. HE. to her to take ; Marguite she CO to it again, ivho would not [c. before I came 3rpool, with its urneyings now )es. For papa larriage. And money, by lum- Jolin, and then veling. That is ^o\\ know," she ig to heterodox de Icurs perc^, Tip cut off tlio It on it as each se built on the Qcle Frank — " those old days im, but a dream ikes." than yours, to |al said, hastily. Of course, it A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 31 is not clear to me. It is just a strange jumble of moving pictures, in which I somehow lose my- self." 'SVnd you like to lose yourself? " ''But yes; why not?" lie turned toward her more directly, leaning his elbow on the bank above him, searching her • face as he asked : * ''You would like to go back to those old :^countries, to spend some time there — this autumn and winter, for instance — with your mother and vfiisters ? " rp The child's face kindled when he began ; but Iwhen he came to those last words its light fell, and she only answered : I "No." " You do not wish to go ?" " I will not go.'' , Then, hurriedly, in a startled way : "Why do ^ou ask me that, monsieur ? I may stay here, is it not so ? I may stay on here with tantc Mar- guite and bonhommo Pacifique ?" " So Marguite says. She tells me she is sure your mother will let you choose for yourself, and that your grandmother insisted on the freedom of your choice, in the last charges she left. Frank" - — he said to her, suddenly, with a change of tone |rom the matter-of-fact one of a moment before " my dear little girl, you are so young, and you 32 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. W4\i W 1 III!' 41 have no friend near you to advise you. Will you be offended if I speak out plainly what I am thinking ? As if — as if I were the Uncle Frank you have told me I must resemble. Then you will be sure I am not speaking carelessly, when I say I fear you are making a mistake. Your mother and sisters should be more to vou than a crabbed old woman who is, after all, not too good to you." "And they?" The words came with emphasis. Kendal'^ face changed, and the girl saw it and said, with a brusque little laugh : "You see I was right when I told you once before, you do not know what you are talking about. " "About a girl's own mother and sisters," was the quiet answer. "Ah, yes. And it goes without saying that my mother loYcd me much, and that is why she sent me away to grandmamma, who loved me also, without doubt. As to mesdemoiselles mcs scBurs, Marie was always away at school, until the last two or three years; and Arsene was the next ; and Melerentc and Anne, they were bes- seonnes." " Besseonnes ? " "Eh, what do you call the same day born— they had each other— why should they trouble A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 33 Will you rhat I am aclc Frank }n you will hen I say I )ur mother [1 a crabbed 00 good to KcnduVs said, "with u Id you once are talking sisters," wa> saying that t is why she |o loved me oiselles mcs shool, until ;ene was the sy were bes- day born- they trouble I W about me ? And a cliild of my ago was in my I mother's way, tante Marguitc says." '* And your father ?" The question escaped Kendal, and in the very ntterunce he regretted it. But not when he saw ithe light that dawned m her face. *' Mv father—" She said the words over, dwelling on them ith a softness in her voice, of which he had not bought it capable. " Ah, yes, my father loved e ! " I The blue eyes widened, deepened ; like the kies they matched, they grew large with a happy rood in g. ;. And then, with a little stir she roused herself out of her dream. '■:, " Although, of course, he did not like to have Itne with him, Marguitc says." J " Of course he did not like to have you with |iin?" I ^Tor I was too much like Uncle Frank." ^nd then again she broke off in a startled way : f * You know!" she cried, breathlessly; "you %now ! " She had not supposed it (for why, indeed, ould a stranger knov/ anything of what had me to pass bo long ago ?); but something in Dr. Lcndal's face now startled her with the misdv- « :5S .1 84 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. j;|i iWi' ill t ' 1! lie answered her reluctantly : "A little. Some idle chatter in the villa^'c to-day supplemented a few words which old Mar- guite let fall." She drew her breath hard. " It was she who told me too, one day when I liad made her very angry." "She is a cruel old woman," Kendal said, indignantly. *^ Poor old tante Marguite, she did not mcar. to be cruel ! I think she was sorry the moment she had spoken ; for she would cover my bread with marmalade for frippe at breakfast, an entire week after. Fancy ! When I just hate marma- lade. She thought I must like it because it wa: English ! " What a child she was still ! Kendal smiled too, as he said : "We ought to be friends, on Sydney Smith'.- rule of friendship, for I hate marmalade, too, But you didn't eat that bread the whole week, . suppose ? " " Oh, but of course I did. You know .' couldn't let poor tante Marguite think I was stii' angry with her, when I had behaved very ill t her too. And tante Marguite has sometime! tried very hard to like me a little. Dr. Ken dal— " " She must have had to try very hard indeed; 1 t fi n nc all Itl ind .ijiiMj ii:;M| !li .iBSf L* the village ch old Mar- | ) day when 1 j iendal BaiilJ lid not incan| the moment I ver my bread. ast, an entire| hate marma-^ because it was J :cndal smiledi ilney Smitli'ii! irmaladc, too, kvhole week, i You know '. link I was stil red very ill ^ las sometime: [tie, Dr. Ken hard indeed,' A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 35 said Kendal, smiling into the fair little, earnest face. -because I resemble her monsieur Fran- (i , )> 901. s '•Some people have a knack of seeing like- nesses," Kendal put in, rather staring at her. **And your grandmamma ?'' "Eh, c^est frt — papa fancied when he sent mo [to her I would comfort her for Uncle Frank ; but from the first she could never bear to look at Imc— " She broke off in a troubled way. "I would never have said anytliing — I would [never have told you anything — but that you knew ilready from tanto Marguite. You are sure of that, monsieur ? " He laughed — just a little shortly. *'I am sure of anything you say, even when rou are at the pains to show me you hold me off, like any other stranger, from all that concerns ^ou. I ought to apologize for so much as think- i!^ 1J mug of interfering- He was taken by surprise when she leaned for- vard, looking at him with eyes suddenly suf- fused. *'You may say anything you wish to me," Dr. Kendal." "Finish it, Frank. 'For you are my friend, Ind I will trust you, even if you don't say any- % ) , ■ 1 li'i : 1 ! . . , i m/- ! 1 1 ' 1 1 , 1." ^ 1 iliniii 86 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. thing of what is in your mind to bring about for mo. And if tlic clow fail — ' " He broke short ofT tlicrc, a^ if in truth lie had said more than lie intended, of what was in his mind. Frank Latour — do Landrcmont ? — the clew ouglit not to fail. One must be able to trace it out at last, although it may take time and trouble. But little Franf;oise had best not know, until there is something more than mere conjecture or coincidence. Until then, let the past be past. lie turned his back on it, witli an impatici t movement of his shoulders, as if there were littK in it he would care to face again. Frank's face was a pleasanter study, with iti puzzled little frown. For the speech he had dictated to her was iier- plexiug : he had put it all into English, while -li was accustomed to eke hers out with a bit c jiatois here and there. And she was not at al Kure of the meaning of that word '*clew." But sho tackled the whole boldlv ; and eve: repeated agaia at the close, quite softly : **For Y'ju are my friend — " then added sunii - thing of her own : " For vou have been kinder to me than cvc any one was, since I was so high," measuring o:' with a wave of her hand above the tall grass. 8] w be is te f |Bre &ri «bs( iiii A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIi:. 37 (f about for o null he IkkI ii was in bi-s 9 the clew to trace it and trouble, know, until •e conjecture the past be an impatici.t 21-0 were litAlc auly, with it her was vov- sh, while j-Ik with a bit o: was uot at ai. clew." I' ly ; and cvr , f tly : n added sonie-^ height ratlier fitted to a fairy than to (lie forlorn little maid of ciglit or nine years who had been Bcnt hero into exile. *' I must liave seemed un- rateful to you,"siio went on, sliyly ; " I had not een used to very much kindness — 1 did not un- erstatul it." ** Are you sure you understand yourself ? For nstance, my little mamsello Frank, you have pokcn of yourself as cold-hearted and unloving ; et I have seen you in a passion of grief for one ho was certainly not everything she might have een to you." She edged nearer to him in the moonlight, .%ith an awed look in her eyes. R^ *' I am afraid of death. And papa died, nd if grandmamma should meet him at once, ,nd tell him I have never been of the least com- rt to her, as ho sent me to be ?" *' But, petite, that is morbid. Was it fault yours that your fair little face brought memo- es too sad for her to bear ? We are not all of is like you, child ; some of us will not face ilie past, but run away from it, even though e know the ghost has little to upbraid us me than cm measuring ot he tall grass, r. )> His tone might, to an older car, have inter- eted the " we '' as something more than a mere rm of speech. But she was just now too self- ^sorbed, in a child's selfishness, to heed. s* *"—■ ' "'■■— I ■(• rrtny ' ifc«i ^ ill 1)1 ,;|iit|l m • n it 38 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. » "Then you do not think I am to llame ? she said, eagerly. " I would have loved her dearly if she had let me." "I am sure of it. And, Frank, when your mother — " But the softness was all gone out of her voice. "That is different." "I am aware of that," he said, quietly. " Every one is different from a mother." "But you do not understand. It was she who made my father untrue to Uncle Frank ; it was she—" She chec^'ed the passionate outburst, covering her face, as Kendal broke ia quietly : " Your mother." "Yes, my mother ?" The calm of those three words was unchild- like enough. But, as ii she were a child, he put his hand on the tv/o wiiich she let fall together ; covering them with a firm pressure. " Wait," he said. "Even A\ere it for you, as her child, to sit in judgment on her, still, you would not judge unjustly ? Recollect, you know but what old Marguito has told you ; a witness the most prejudiced — " She shook his hand from her, as she started to her feet. " I have heard too much already !" she cried, passionately. " What ! you would have me be- I A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 30 lieve my father something worse than Marguite has taught mo ; not the dupe of a false woman, but a traitor !" She flung from him, with that last word ; and Kendal, if he had had any answer to it, could not have spoken it ; for, swiftly as she had flitted out of his ken on that first evening when he saw her, she passed from him now, the low firs snatching her from sigiit, down the hill- side. Kendal could see nothing better than just to mount and ride away. So, then, what had been gained by this at- tempt with a legion of arguments to bring this little savage to terms ? " ' The King of France, with twenty thousand men, Marched up a hill, and then marched down again,' " Kendal said to himself rather scornfully ; and turned his horse's head f : . home. - ■>.-^.i'-:-t»'aJ.-.jt(»a4 »i8aigat «hiite.'1uce her to, began like many another in the old I'arm-kitchen. Just now Kendal's voice had jwused a moment in his reading ; for on the other side of UiQ wide room, at either end of the spread supper-table, stood the old husband and wife, with reverently bowed heads, reciting in antipho- ny a sort of litany of grace before meat. The logs piled up in the wide hearth sent red lights flickering about the walls and shining floor ; the high old-fashioned dressers with their rows of burnished tins ; the spinning-wheel in its chim- ney-corner ; and the two standing figures — Mar- guite with her sharp features shaded by the white cap she wore as her mother had before her ; and solemn Pacifique in his new lumberman's dress, in which he will go off to-morrow to the woods, resplendent in blue flannel shirt, with gay silk handkerchief knotted about the throat, and breast-plate of red flannel embroidered with a gayly-plumaged cock. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 45 I be ac- :iqnatcd lit it ap- her for- bad ad- Fair " to er in the oice had the other le spread nd wife, antipho- at. The ed lights oor ; the rows of its chim- es — Mar- the white her ; and ti's dress, le woods, gay silk oat, and with a All things come to an end, the long grace with the rest. Pacifique had caught up his shining pcwter-mng, making the sign of the cross with a sweep of his arm before he drank ; the two old people were sitting down to their evening meal, and the girl was saying : ^' Go on — go on ! " impatient of her reader's pause. Kendal glanced across at her, from under tlie shade of his hand that kept the direct rays of the flickering lamp from his eyes. She was sitting opposite to him at the small table, her arms upon it, her face framed in her two hands, her eyes fixed in breathless listening on his face. Why in the TTorld did he pause so long ? And why, when he resumed, did he turn the page back, not for- ward : "... Entering then Right o'er a mount of newly fallen stones, The dusky-raftered, many-cobwebbed hall, lie found an ancient dame— And near her, like a blossom vermeil-white That lightly breaks a faded flower-sheath, — Here, by God's rood, is the one maid for me !" *'Why do you stop ?" cried Frangoise again, '^and go backward? and why — eh, you have left out something this time ! " Kendal pushed the book from him ; he said, in an altered tone, half lightly : 40 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 1 .1 f piiiiiniiiii 1 ;| i; : y ' , ■ t i "Frank, the old place will soon be changing, Dame Marguite tells me. "When the leaves come out, * the dusky-raftered hall ' will be coming out too in new colors and freshness. The quaint rid paneled doors are to know paint again, and the long, sloping roofs to renew their coat of white- wash. Pacifique's hoe is to be down on the bram- ble-roses, and the sedge-grass that has blotted out the garden-beds ; and the first boat that can come up the river to the foot of the falls is to bring what my neighbor, old Niel MacNiel, would call *braw new inside plenishing,' up from Frederic- ton. And then everything will be ready for Madame Jean and her household to come like the summer birds over the sea. And about the old place there will gather a life and brightness such as you can never remember here — " " What will it be like ? " she broke in, eagerly. She was looking at him with a wondering ex- pectancy. " "What will it be like ? " " Like the old times, perhaps. Has Marguite never told you of them ? " There was a chill of disappointment in his tone, at her eagerness ; but as he answered her promptly enough, she did not observe it. ** Marguite ? She never tells me anything." '* Perhaps I know, then, better than the lady of the manor. I have heard it mentioned in the village how gay the old house was a score or so of A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 4« years ago ; how there were lines of carriages from much farther down the river than Tobique-way ; even garrison-parties from as far as Fredericton ; and music and dancing, such as the old walls and floors would tremble at now.'* The girl was trembling, in a quiver of excite- ment. *' Dr. Kendal ! will it be so again ?" " What should prevent it ? " Not the poor old lady's death, he said to himself, rather grimly. The family were letting time enough elapse be- fore coming to take posession ; and surely they could do so then with the proper festivities, after these months of mourning conceded to the old house. "Xe roi est mort — vive U roi" is the same all the world over. And Frangoise — for why, in- deed, should the girl mourn ? — Frangoise sitting over there now in her shabby gray gown — "... a blossom verraeil-white, That lightly breaks a faded flowcr-shcath," would blossom out, like Enid, in all her spring- time bravery, and quite forget this gloomy winter. He was the more taken by surprise when the April face suddenly clouded over. She pushed back her chair with a sharp movement. "Me, I shall run away to tante Marguite. You know that, when they come, she means to withdraw herself to the little cottage at the other I i I -. VM& !.:' m' f;, 11 irf I 'l»illlil!ri,ii!i;iiil li'lilli'!!! Mill M iM m M A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. ■■■> •^ % end of the farm, whicli grandmamma left her. Me, I hate change ; I should miss the old free life — and grandmamma." It was almost the only time the name had crossed her lips since that evening after the fu- neral, when it had broken from her in a storm of vehement, half -angry tears. She spoke it now in a low, reverent way which showed that the bitterness of the past was past. It was Kendal's tone which had the bitterness in it now. "And me, Frank?" he said. "And me? Ah, child, may you always be so honest with me : even when it is to show me I am nothing to you — not even to be missed." "Missed?** There was anxiety enough in her eyes, in her voice, to acquit her of in- difference. "You are not going away, mon- sieur lo doctor ? You are not going to leave me alone ? " '^ He answered her with an odd sort of smile, and a question of his own : **It is you who are going, not I. IIow far, in that gay new life of yours, from the village doc- tor with his traveling pharmacy of saddle-bags ? Little Frank, as yet you do not know enough of the world to answer me that ; but you soon will learn." "I shall never learn — never, if, by my learn- A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 49 ing the world, yon mean forgetting my best friends." She reached her hand out to him, across the table. What could the man do, but seize it with an eager violence that almost crushed the small fingers ? And then (old Pacifique had pushed away his chair and was turning to the door, and Marguite was busied at the dresser, with her back to them) Kendal stooped and brushed those Gngers with his bearded lips. ^' Frank, if you would let me be your best and closest friend, indeed : if I could teach you to trust yourself to me ! " He spoke so quietly, there was nothing to startle her, so she said : "But I have learned that already." Kendal did not so much as raise his head and look at her. It was as though he feared to break, with slightest movement, the spell of some dream too blessed to tarry out of para- dise. Did the girl's own clear and steady voice break it, when, with that briefest pause, she went on : " When one has been so very kind as you have been to me, that is a lesson which surely needs no teaching." At that he raised his head, still keeping her hand, but in a quiet clasp. His face was quiet, and a little paler than before. GO A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. Ill ' " Lessons, Frank — I have given you a few of these, indeed — tiresome things — " *' Oh, but indeed, indeed it was good of you she cried ; not denying Iiis qualificative, howe\ci. *' For wlijit should I do without them — I who knew nothing, just notliing at all ? I should have been ten times as much afraid of mamma and Marie and the others." *' — And while I have been giving these," ho went on, taking up agivin the thread of his speech, and not caring to break it off with any discourag- ing hint of the difference between his method of instruction and that of the fashionable masters her sisters had no doubt had — " and while I h" been giving these, did you never once think W- you have been teaching me ?" "/—teaching you 9 " He answered her with a slight smile of mock- cry at himself, as he let her hand go. " Any boy of twenty might have told mo I was a fool for my pains. But so it was ; I learned the lesson by heart, though you gave it without meaning that I should. Were I a boy of twenty again, I might hope to unlearn it ; but not now. Frank, can you tell me what it is ?" He was leaning toward her, when tante Mar- guite's heavy tread shook the floor, and she drew out her spinning-wheel at the other side of the hearth. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 61 Sitting over against the low ilax- wheel, she was expert enough to be able to divide her atten- tion between her shining thread that, as she drew it out, canglit here and there a gleam of the leap- ing firelight, and the thread of the conversation opposite, which certainly was not running smooth- ly nor brightly at this moment. But the ma!i could not stop now ; the suspense of waiting till a more convenient season would have been unbearable. He went on, trusting his glance to be his in- terpreter : " Will you try to repeat the lesson after me ? ' I love you.' If you could ever learn it — " Just those words, '*I love you," in the Eng- lish, which tante Marguito would not understand : the rest in French. And in French Frangoise was answering him, except just those three English words : ** ' I love you.' " She said it blushing, laugh- ing a shy little laugh. " It is quite easy, indeed, Dr. Kendal — and I don't mean to forget it^ though I am not twenty ! " At those last words, his face clouded over. Xot twenty ; a mere child. What right had ho to bind her so ? When, perhaps, if she knew all— The past had seemed so utterly past and gone to him that he had turned his back upon it, even e 52 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. in his thoughts. But now he must look at the dead thing once more ; must even show it to Frangoise. " Frank," he said, liurriedly, "Frank, I have a story to teli you — " There he became conscious of Marguite's sharp eyes observing him. True, she could not understand his words ; but no one could be with tante Marguite without feeling sure that she heard and felt, as well as saw, with those black-beaded eyes of hers. Frank looked up, as he stopped ; and she clasped her hands half-gleefully, half-teasingly : "A story ? A little history ? Ah, yes, let us have it. Me, I know none but tante Marguite's, about the Christmas-eve Cattle and the Birds of St. Luc." *' The Birds of St. Luc?" " The oxen, they are, you know. And once tliere was an old man — " What she said was, ^' A71 fors y 'va an viert hnommc." But by this time Kendal was suffi- ciently familiar with the dialect to follow easily enough the ancient Breton legend of the master who fell asleep one Christmas-eve in the manger, under the nose of his oxen, and was awakened after midnight by their talking together in good Christian speech. Every one knows (and it evi- dently has not occurred to Fran^oise to dispute it I ill! A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 58 seriously, though she does glance askance at Ken- dal to see how he is taking it) that the cattle are thus privileged this once a year, in memory of the Child who shared their manger on the first Christmas. " We arc going to bury our master to- morrow, demoin," said they. And, sure enough ! The master when he heard them, resolved to keep out of danger by not going to church on Christ- mas-day, as there was a troublesome ford to cross upon the road. Instead, he went to the forest, and spent tho holy-day in wood-cutting. Toward evening he was coming home with a " f/riis out- arr/e " of wood, and had reached the cross-road to tho church, when his oxen began to back wildly away from it, with their unholy load. The old man was very frightened, until he bethought himself to stop them by laying two logs athwart the load, in the form of a cross. That did stop them, of course ; but so suddenly, and with such a jar, that the master was thrown heavily forward to the ground, and the solid wooden wheels went over him. So tho oxen did bury him, after all, scraping a hole under the dead leaves with their hoofs. " He was a very wicked man ; he did not say his penitence," Frangoise wound up, nodding sig- nificantly at Kendal. " Tante Marguite can tell you what comes of that, and how sometimes a great frog will leap up in the woods and fasten on 1'^^^ 54 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. iiii ;!ii ,il! ill II U one's nose for punishment, until the penitence be duly said." She put up her hand, laughing, to her own straight little nose. "Me, I am not of the faith- ful," she added, more seriously. Tante Marguite looked suspicious ( he Eng- lish words. She must have divined thcii meaning. *' It is all Madame Jean's fault," she said, shaking her head, gloomily — "all Madame Jean's fault ! She led Monsieur Jean astray out of the faith ; and my dear madame here, she would never meddle with the child. * Blood can not lie,' the dear madame would say, thinking of Madame Jean. But, passe ! " Marguite put the subject from her with that meaning shrug, and set her spinning-wheel in motion again with the hand that had stayed it to deliver this thrust. That the girl felt it, the sudden angry sparkle of tears in her blue eyes showed ; but when Ken- dal would have spoken for her, she stopped him ■with a laugh — a little forced, perhaps, but reso- lutely careless. "As tante Marguite says, passe ! Monsieur is not my breastplate, to recei'^e these thrusts for me. 5> " If I might be ! " he said, eagerly, could but teach you- (( If I ?j This time, the laugh with which she inter- r ji 1 1 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 55 rupted him was merry enough. Iler girlish in- stinct would have kept her silent had the two been alone together ; but she was safe under Mar- guite's eyes. "You sec, monsieur le docteur,"' she said in French, shaking her pretty head at him, "you must not be always for giving lessons ; and you must take care what you teach me. I'm not so very dull at learning, and I do not forget. So, if there are any mistakes made, it is quite your fault." " Mercy of my life ! " Even Kendal, through all his grave burden of thought, could not for- bear a smile at the shocked tone, and the way in which Marguite resumed her spinning, with a vicious push to the wheel. "It is just a wonder to me how monsieur le docteur has ever had the patience to bear with mamselle, lesson after les- son, and she with no more gratitude than that. You are going, monsieur ? But I don't wonder, and mamselle idling as if she were possessed by the sleepy devil that makes sinners nod in church. But monsieur has the patience of an angel ! " Now, the crafty old woman had her own opin- ion as to Dr. Kendal's patience. She thouglit that was sufficiently explained by a desire, very natural iu the village doctor, to lay the De Lan- dremont house under such obligation as would open its doors to him in tlie briglitcr days that 56 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. r :i P h Hi were about to dawn upon it. She did not care to set herself to thwart that desire ; more especially as it enabled her to describe the various phases of her rheumatism and have them prescribed for, without any drain upon the purse of which she, not Pacifique, held the strings, and rather tightly too. She did not grumble at the lessons, there- fore. This one was evidently to be cut short. Ken- dal found it impossible to treat this evening as if it were anything else than the gate to his whole future. What lay beyond it — what it must lead to— Ho stood looking at the little creature who stopped the gap and would not let him see beyond, and was saying saucily : " Indeed, tante Marguite, Dr. Kendal is quite satisfied with my progress, and even telis me I have taught him something. Though, indeed" — casting down her eyes demurely — "I should never have had the assurance to try to do that.'^ Kendal glanced wistfully at the red mouth quivering with its suppressed smile. Was he to have nothing but a mocking last word from it ? "Won't you light me out ?" he asked her. But she shook her head. "Tante Marguite will, this time, I am sure — won't you, tante Marguite ? I must go over my lesson. I promise to be quite perfect in it when II' iv .'i: >•?«». A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 57 you come back — if I can," she added, lifting her eyes with a flashing smile over the screen of her open book. And so he went away. Somewhat dizzily ; like a man who has stum- bled perilously near a precipice's brink, and only just stops himself in time. But had he stopped himself in time ? Was it not already too late to consider whether he ought to have wooed this child ? What did she know of love ? " J'aime "—"I love, I like "—it was all one to her. As he plunged into the dimness of the wood-path, he could see again those bright eyes flashing laughter at him over the edge of her book. Eh, well, the pain was only his ; the girl would take no harm if this evening's lesson should not be repeated. And it must not be repeated now. The man was a strong man; he must al^^ the mastery over himself. A little while, and her mother would be here ; Frangoise should choose between them then. It was not a dazzling lot, that of a poor country doctor's wife ; if she should take it, instead of the new, gay life of which, no doubt, her mother would set the door ajar before her eyes, it should be with them wide open. Meantime, Kendal was very far from giving her up, in his mind, much less his heart. All he could do to win her trust and faith he would do. I 58 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. li liim. ,!: ( ii' |! "i .1! ' 111 m That was enough for the present, and the past might wait. Away oil somewhere in the distance, some rest- less brook, released from winter's bondage, filled all the windless hush with babble of spring's com- ing. Up the hill-slope, as Kendal crossed, the rising moonbeams drifted level through the black- layered fir-boughs, and caught at the slim, silver birches, and showed them rough with buds against the sky. " When the leaves come out ! " Kendal said to him.self, with that sense of hope and new life which the spring brings with it. A.nd yet to-night old memories were stirring. As he struck out of the wood, he had fallen un- aware into a certain measured tread, catching up a snatch of a glee with a martial ring in it, once familiar enough to come to his lips now uncon- sciously : " Wiicn the leaves come out, down with the streams we'll be sweeping ; We'll waken our land from her long winter sleeping." What if Latour were to come with that waking ? Was Frangoise sleeping now, under the eaves, in the old house ? To Kendal, us he shouldered aside a dusky evergreen, and the moon flashed out, it was as if her eyes shone out on him again over the edge of her book. But this time, it seemed to him, not in mock- ery. /«i ;.'; 1 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 59 V. "My heart* is like a singing bird, Whose nest is in a watered shoot ; My heart is like an apple-tree, Whose boughsr— " Only, it was the apple-blossoms that the girl was like, as she sat swinging amid them, on the , low bough of the gnarled tree that somehow long ago hud straggled outside the gate to the road. For there was a gate now before the rambling De Landremont cottage, though the unpracticed. eye might not detect it. Ratlier, perhaps, the unpracticed eye might have taken the whole fence for a succession of gates : so alike were all the sections, with their heavy top and bottom rail, into which the light upright stems fitted like pickets, but with the bark still on. It had as rustic a look as the pitch- pole, or the old '' Virginny " fence, and the green- ery pressed nearly up to it, across the road. The road was a narrow, disused one ; a mere spur of the highway which trends away and away . up through the Madawaska settlement, beyond which the Acadians merge into Canadians. It was seldom that any one nowadays turned round that bend : and when Frank heard the beat of i ' ■ ■ '; 1 , i t ■ i i .> H: 60 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. hoofs, she never thought of glancing up from the long, blue stocking she was knitting, with her head bent over it in a brown study, until the rush nearer and nearer made her start. If that bright bay were not actually running away, his driver had at least as much as he could do to prevent it, and the solid fence apparently in front. But, in a flash, there is a gap in it. A section of it is lifted out bodily, and Fran9oise stands to one side, flashed and glowing with her haste and her exertion. Outside, in the road, the dust blowing about her, her homespun dress gathered up, apron-wise, over her blue petticoat, for the accommodation of the knitting which she has already taken into her busy hands again, she has nothing to mark her from the bevy of filles whom the traveler earlier in his long drive had met returning from school, and who had arranged themselves prettily along the road-side, with shy nod and smile for the passing stranger. This girl looked as young as some of those, and as simply dressed ; and the young fellow felt he was indemnifying himself for the lack of excuse toward those others, when in passing he leaned out toward her. "Many thanks, my little one," he was saying, in French foreign to the district ; equally foreign to France too, Frank was sure, as she caught the A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 61 Anglo-Saxon intonation. Something else she caught, also — the glitter of a piece of silver in his hand. She put hers out, a little slowly, in response ; and he deftly tossed the coin into it. The next instant, the restive horse had carried him beyond her ; and she speedily effaced herself from the scene, pushing through the thicket bordering the road. That Avas the last Frank saw of him ; that glimpse of the straight young fellow with the fair hair and the frank face as beardless as if, accord- ing to an old Breton superstition, a careless priest had touched him at baptism with "the oil of girls. " It was the last she saw of him ; but not the first she had hea 'd of him, she was very sure. When she was well out of sight, she drew a letter from her pocket : one of those rambling, inconsequent, gossipy letters which Marie would occasionally write to her little sister, now that there was no censorious grandmother to inspect them. And — yes, it was in this, that Marie told of a certain young Englishman who had come over on the same steamer to Halifax — Dallas Fraser by name. ^*And as mamma has some- where, down about the roots of her family-tree, one Euphemia Dallas, we have all come to the conclusion that this very big D is a great, um- mm •J' ■ 62 A LITTLE 5LVID OF ACADIE. brageous, golden-leafed branch of the same tree. Be that as it may, he is to cast his shadow over us in the skirts of the forest, what time the weather as well as the calendar shall call it summer. Meantime, he is doing Canada, wliilc we remained to smother in spring fogs at Halifax, and then made our way toward you as far as Fredericton here. Will the weather ever let us get any far- ther ? When it docs, Mr. Fraser is to drive down for the fishing, from some place opposite Quebec, and we shall drive up the river with a gay party promised us from here ; and it will go hard if we do not manage to wake all the old woodland echoes.*' Frank crumpled the letter into her pocket again, as she strayed on. She did not linger in the greenery, within hearing of the horse's re- turning tread, when the visitor should find the house unoccupied ; for Marguite had gone up to St. Leonard's to confesse, and would not be homo until late. In fact, the sun had set, when Frank strayed back again, and found the old woman busy over the kitchen fire. Marguite turned round sharply, as the girl came breezily in, tossing the coin, and catching it as it fell. "Heads or tails, tante Marguite? If it's heads, it's mine ; for you will own I'd a very good head of my own, to earn it. You should A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. G3 have been here to see liow I swung that gate open — " ^'Comme ga! and let in that Nanon Michaud's whole flock of geese ! I might have known I could not even go to confesse — " *' Without missing visitors ? 1 doubt you'd liave liked him much better than the geese, tante Marguite,"she said, good-humorcdly — " this kins- man of Madame Jean's." *' Dame ! what is the child driving at ? " 'MVhat was the man driving at, you mean, tante Marguite ? Straight at our fine new fence, apparently. Only I stopped him by throwing the gate open. Whereupon, he rewarded me as vou see." She showed the coin in her palm, with a laugh- ing air of triumph. "Mamselle Fran9uaise ! Mamselle Fran9uaise ! to think you'd have gone and done such a thing ! " *'^W^hy, tante Marguite, the gentleman — " *' A pretty gentleman ! " "A very pretty gentleman, indeed," says the girl, demurely. ^' Listen a little, tante Marguite ; Madame Jean and her suite will be down upon you before you can turn on your heel." " Saint Anne help us ! what does mamselle mean ? " " That you may call on the best saints for help, tante Marguite, but if you don't bestir yourself, ■ I IS* u A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE.* Madame Jean will find you here, under her roof, instead of settled under your own." "No, that she shall not! There has been a letter? I'll move out to the cottage, vie ct bagues muves, the very first thing in the morning, you will see ! But there has been a letter, mamsellc Franyuaise ? Or your Monsieur Tchouse, did he bring a message from Madame Jean ?" *'Ben, tanto Marguite : vie et hagucs sauvcs j I'll stand for the hagues, for I mean to go with you, just at first. No, no letter, and no chance to deliver any message. But the pretty gentle- man, my Monsieur Tchouse, is Madame Jean's avant coureur : none other than our — what is it ? — twentieth possible cousin, who has lately come into a huge English fortune, and is, no doubt, a most admirable member of the family." "Impossible — " " But a fact. If you had been a wicked here- tic, like some others — " with a little money '* and not gone to confesse, you would have had to ask him to stay, for your sins. Me, I didn't know wiiat to do with him, I own it. Besides, he 1 id given mo this." She was tossing the coin gayly agaii aoving to and fro, the firelight chasing her slim rhad^.v here and there, as it flitted about. Marguite followed her with her sharp little black Dame Partlet eyes ; keen enough after the I I A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 65 grain of corn and tlie cartli-worni (or whatsoever may represent tliese, to tlie human Dame Partlet), but dull of vision for much that is as plain to other less keen souls as the clouds in an April sky. Frank's blue eyes were full of them. They portended just such a blinding shower of passion- ate tears as fell upon the distaff in her hand, the very moment the old woman had pattered out with her milk-jug to the spring-house under the hill. And so he had taken her for one of the village- girls, this cousin of hers — of her mother's. And she was just the same as they ; no differ- ence. But why had not Dr. Kendal told her so ? Tlie passionate child was as angry with him as if ho were responsible for her mortification. As for the badge of that mortification, the piece of silver, she found a tiny hole in it — or made one — and she fell asleep that night with the oin strung on a thin gold chain, about her neck, and heaving with every stormy heaving of her passionate heart, as she lay and dreamed the scene all over. Only, in her dream, her mother stood by, watch 'ng with a strange smile, the one thing clear to Frank in that misty, half-forgotten face. 5 GG A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. Perhaps that part of her vision was due to the fact that the chair, was last clasped about her neck by hcrmother^s hand. Franjoise had never worn it since she came here, and tante Marguitc held the slight thing in her hand, in unpacking the child's trunk, and delivered her first sermon to mamselle Fran9uaise with Madame Jean for text. Franyoise had kept it hidden away ever since — a sort of fetich, half cherished and half dreaded — before which, tucked away in the corner of her little trunk with which she was sent home to Madame do Landremont, she >''ould kneel now and then, looking at it with brooding eyes, as if it represented the mother whose actual personality was so overlaid by tante Marguite's legends and traditions, that, like many another worshiper, little Fran9oise on her knees was not sure if the object of her cult were more demon or more angel. And this it was, to which she linked the coin so lightly tossed to her by Dallas Fraser. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 67 VI. " Tu t'en vas, tu d61aisses ta pcrsonne ; Tes proracsscs sont des angros : Til m'avas promis la foi bonne, Aimer ta personnc 'usqu, ti la mort — A present tu m' abandonnes, Tu t'eloigncs de ce port — " The slirill, wild voice was disputing for the right to bo heard, with the deep boom of the Grand Falls down into their rocky basin, and the rush of the rapids against the foot-rocks of the walls which shut that basin in : *' Mon batimaine est mouill6 en rade — Trois de mcs camaradcs Qui vont voguer — J'en tends la cloche qui sonne : Ma mignonne, Faut s'embarqucr." Evidently the lover in the song had '^ one foot on sea and one on shore," and took his leave in jolly strain. But his " personne " had the last word, with her : " Triste 'oiture qu' an vaisseau — Triste 'oiture qu' an vaisseau"— and the singer's voice changed into that wild, de- spairing cry that had pierced through the boom- 68 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. ing of the waters, and reached the ear of a man clambering down the steep face of the cliff above her. lie had come here to see the rapids, and the curious wells formed in the rocks among them. But now it is the singer who draws him down from crag to crag, until — Yes, there she lies in the sunshine on the rocks ; a little, curled-up figure, with round, half-bared arm flung across the upturned face, so that hardly anything is to be seen of it but the red lips shrill- ing forth the ditty. So pretty a picture she makes there, that the man who has just burst upon it stands to look. Startled, too ; for she has chosen her resting-place amid such a fury of waters, that he half puts out his arm as if an inadvertent move of hers might send her slipping off the rock's smooth surface down into the torrent. As he looks, the very rocks seem to heave with the long, rhythmic upheaval of the rapids. The waters rise and fall like the ground-swell of a heavy sea, only broken into broad swaths that twine under and over one another, in and out. The brown translucent water, fretted as it is with snowy spray against the base of the steep cliffs that close the gorge on either hand ; the flakes of foam swept downward in the current from the cataract above ; the blue-green, yellowed here and A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. G9 there, of firs and spruce-trees standing stiff and dour in the cleft precipice's face ; the shimmer- ing silver-stemmed birch a-tremble in the breeze above ; the ferns and mosses, and the lichens many-hued, that paint the walls of this rock- chamber, which a sudden turn in the sharp preci- pice shuts in — it all photographs itself in the yel- low afternoon light on the young man's mind, as the background to that picture of the figure prone upon the rocks. A child's figure ? Half he hesitates ; till, peeping from beneath the dimpled elbow as she lies, he catches sight of a thin black book — " PriiViOi — " That is all there is to be seen of the title ; but it seems to be enough to give him leave to stoop and put his hand upon her shoulder, giving it a little shako, as the torrent drowned the sound of his tread. " My dear—" She was on her knees in an instant, that being the position the most swiftly attainable on the slanting rock. The small, round, lifted face was just one of those over-leaning rock-roses, for color, as he looked down into it, and said : " I beg your pardon, but I have quite lost my way, and I think you could put me into it. Be- sides," he added, with a smile, '' I am afraid you are playing truant down here. It will never do 70 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. m to waste the whole day, and your primer all un- learned.'' She had caught up the little book, folding it in her apron, as she looked down, blushing still. Was she so much ashamed of playing truant ? "Plait-il?" she said, as if she had not under- stood ; and then, thinking better of it, *• Where is it monsieur wishes to go ? " ** To the old De Landremont place. Do you know it ? " " Yes, I know it. If monsieur goes up to the bridge, and then into the woods beyond — " "But it is precisely short of the bridge that I have lost myself. Up there, above the cliffs, the clumps of evergreens have planted themselves out in the most bewildering of labyrinths, among which one may very well need a guide." She opened her blue eyes wide. " Monsieur is a stranger, then ? Perhaps the English cousin who is expected ? " "Yes, I am the cousin, certainly. Is the neighborhood expecting me ?" he said, half laugh- ing ; " for I understand the family have not ar- rived." "Eh, not the neighborhood ; they never heed what passes under the De Landremont roof. But tante Marguite — she that used to be housekeeper there — had a letter bidding her make ready, that the family were coming, and guests with them." A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 71 " Tante Marguite ? " What a dainty little creature, for a niece to the housekeeper ! ** Couldn't you manage, since through your good aunt we are in a manner acquaintances, to guide me through the firs ?" She rose to her feet, tilting her hat over her face, and deftly gathering up the folds of her homely dress in such a fashion as that no mascu- line eye would detect its proper "grown-up" length. To be sure, now that she was standing, the young man thought her rather tall to be pur- suing her studies in a primer. But then he re- flected how backward must be education in this part of the world ; and the little, dimpled, child- ish face — "And yonder is your school-room, down among the waters ? " " Yes ; does not monsieur like it ? " " So well that I wish I might learn my book there, one of these bright days." But the girl took no notice of the questioning inflection ; and he fell back upon the orthodox inquiries one makes of a school-girl concerning her studies. " It is not the French abece," he said, stoop- ing slightly for a glance at her black primer ; which, however, he failed to get, as it was still wrapped in the apron, not to show him that it was a recent hand-book primer of English liter- 1 1 72 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. , Ji ii ature. " They teach you English at the school ? " lie said, in English. The Sisters who teach pass the regular exami- nations as public-school teachers, rran9oise told him. " Me, my English has its faults," she added, demurely, dropping her French; "my remem- beree is not too good." " Is it not ?" said Eraser, laughing ; regretting the laughter the next moment, as it seemed to have the effect of silencing the little creature trip- ping on before him. The steep climb to the summit of the cliff had been made, and they paused on the brink to- gether, for a moment's looking down upon the gorge, and on the wild, white water beating and tearing its way out of those towering prison-walls. And then the two went on among the shrubbery- like clumps of evergreens, where Dallas Eraser might well have lost himself in the labyrinth, as he had said. But, after all, was it not as good a method as any other, of ridding himself of a long afternoon ? He was quite sure of it, when he brought his roving glance from the tangled green- ery upon all hands, back to the little creature tripping on demurely at his side. " I hope I am not taking you too far out of your way ? " he said, comfortably ; not from any intention of releasing her, but to hear her voice m ifrii^ A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 73 again. Then he leaned forward, trying to see licr face ; and, failing : **Are you not leading me blindfold ? Fori am quite sure you can not find your way out of the depths of that hat — I have quite loct yon in it." ** But then that does not matter, as monsieur is not looking for me, but for the road." Then she pushed it back a little, glancing up at him. " I don't wear it all the time. It is only my study-cap ; it shuts out everything but the book, vou know." *' Envious thing ! I am glad you don't. And you come here to study every day ? " "When I have nothing better to do." " Then there are things better ?" " But, yes ; much better. For instance, when I go out for a long day on the barrens, and — ramosse des gran ages — what you call, pick ber- ries. » "The berries are for your — aunt Margot, isn't it?" She lifted her eyes, with a malicious laugh in them. Would he be very much discomfited at finding that she was his cousin : she whom he had evidently taken for the housekeeper's niece ? He had caught the gleam of amusement in her glance. " How stupid I am I" he cried. " Of course 71 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. mm ■I'll it was you ! You were at the gate, and opened it to me when my horse was running away. That I am here safe and sound I owe to you." A tide of crimson flooded the girl's face. Owed ! — she recalled, well enough, how he had paid that debt. That coin w^as like a seal upon her lips. Why should she confess to him who she really is ? He will go away soon, and he need never know. Surely, she could keep cut of his way for a fevr days. If need be, she could stay with tante Mar- guite till he is gone. They had skirted Grand Falls village by this time ; and the rush of waters under the suspen- sion-bridge, as the two crossed it, took away all occasion for speech, if his words called for any answer. The smooth river, glowing in the slant- ing beams with soft, changeful, opalescent lights, speeds calmly to the very brink of the wide horse- shoe, all the curve of which it fills with glancing rainbow spray, as it fills the tranquil evening and the darkening chambers of the winding gorge with the clamor of its thunderous voices. Other voices sink into instinctive silence. The grave- browed haUtant on foot nods a mute salutation to his neighbor plodding home behind his oxen, whose ponderous tread upon the bridge falls as noiselessly as that of the moccasined Indian, slip- ping like a sun-bronzed shadow past the curve of A. LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. Y5 woods. Fran9oise shows him by a slight gesture to her companion ; but does not explain, until, on the sloping road beyond the gorge, they look down toward the cataract. Then she tells Dallas Fraser its old Indian tradition : of the brave Milicete girl taken prisoner by a hostile band, who forced her to act as guide in a descent on her own tribe ; and how she led the descent in her canoe, straight for the treacher- ous falls, and death with her tribe's enemies. She told it with a sparkle in her eyes, at which Dallas protested he could not but feel uneasiness, lest that sort of thing should bo the prevalent fashion for guides all about Madawaska. At which — for it takes little enough to set two young people laughing together on a golden summer aft- ernoon — they went on merrily, by a short-cut, where Frank flitted past him, glancing back at him, over her shoulder, with a nod : "Follow me — if you can trust me ! " For a few yards plunging deep into the thicket, where her brown hands held back the boughs to let him through. To leave herself the freer, she liad caught her gown up through her belt, in a festoon here and there, that gave a g Impse of a dark-blue petticoat, and a foot and ankle in keep- ing with the pretty, rounded figure. It was well worth watching in its supple motions, as it went on before him, so free and natural, with such an 76 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. utter absence of self-consciousness, such an igno- rance of the charming moving picture she made in the rather washed-out liomespun ; the trouble- some hat dangling now from her arm, and sundry rebel locks breaking out of confinement and curl- ing softly all about her warm white neck and that crumpled rose-leaf of an ear. Somehow, Dallas did not regret the narrow- ness of the path, that would not admit of tvro walking abreast. One may take a more com- fortable look at a pretty thing like that, when not sto^Dped by a pair of frank and sudden eyes that have a trick of intercepting such a look. But he was stopped suddenly by a quick, startled, almost frightened gesture from the girl. She stood in the path, her two arms raised to ward off a tangle of wild brier which the wind flung toward her. But she forgot it, and stood motionless in a listening attitude. Dallas went to her hastily. He could not see her face, nor the object, whatever it might be, at which she was gazing so intently. From his standpoint, there was a blank of greenery all about. Onlv, on one round arm still raised me- chanically to ward off the briery bough — on that arm, bared to the dimpled elbow by the brier catching at her sleeve, he saw a sharp red line, a crimson drop that trickled down. The sight of blood may turn some men pale. ■::l! ■ii ' A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 77 but it brought the liot color into Dallas Fraser's face. lie pushed in between her and the thorns. "You have hurt yourself — for me ! " She shook off his touch with an impatient movement. She hardly heard his words ; she was not even looking at him. She put her finger to her lips with a gesture of silence, still in that expectant and yet shrinking attitude. And as they stood thus for an instant, there came to his ear also the sound which had reached hers first : the sound of wheels approaching. " We are near the road, then ?" ho said. As he stepped before her, the green boughs gave way like a curtain swept aside, and showed him the overgrown road ; and, breast-high in the weeds, a pair of grays drawing a close traveling- carriage. <'It must be Mrs. de Landremont arrived at last ! " said he, turning toward his guide. But she was no longer at his side. There was the flutter of a homespun dress, a rustling through the thicket ; and he stood alone upon the bank above the road, along which came the carriage. The carriage ? — no, but two, three — quite a procession, looking very much like conveyances gathered athap-hazard in the village. Out of the foremost, a charming face he knew was leaning from the window, smiling and nodding to him. ■^^ i 78 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. VII. li 41 "Free Heart, that sin{;est to-day Like a bird on the first green spray, Wilt thou go forth to the world Where the hawk hath hla M'ing unfurled To follow perhaps thy way ? Where the tamer thine own will bind, And to make thee sing, will blind — While the little hip grows for the free behind ? Heart, wilt thou go ? — . Ah, no ! Free hearts are better so." "But where is Frank?" said the owner of that charming face, not many moments later, pausing at the foot of the cloor-stei)s, by which most of the little procession that had come gayly up from the gate to the house had already disap- peared within. Marie asked the question, and the girl behind her — who looked indeed like an embodied echo of her — emphasized it, " Where is Frank ? " — with apparently little expectation of an answer, as she gazed helplessly about her. There was neither shrubbery nor undergrowth now, to hide so much as a mouse, in the level space which Pacifique had trimmed up until it was anything but ornamental. Trim it was, indeed ; A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. Vj an array of formal beds, in wliich no flowers were get out as yet, and only the whitewashed stones pointed out their places. All the ferns had been uprooted, and the sumacs and the brier-roses de- molished. Franyoiso might not like it as well as in its days of ragged picturesqueness ; but it was a model of neat precision. Even the old house had a rejuvenated air, with its fresh paint. Its very disheveled vines were stroked down into decorous bands that lay smoothly above the windows no longer staring out like empty eye- sockets ; but curtained, and with a certain look of quiet possession, observable about the whole face of the house. Bonhonime Pacifique potter- ing about the littered yard had been in keeping with the past regime. Under the present, a maid tripped briskly forward from the spring-wagon turning from the gate, to take the ladies' shawls ; and another, a staid elderly body sent back by Mrs. de Landremont, stood waiting a respectful instant to show the way indoors. " Please, miss, your mamma says it is not long before dinner." ^^ And we must make ourselves beautiful for it ; and if Mr. Fraser has not changed since when we knew him on shipboard, a dinner — even the sort of picnic dinner which I am afraid is all we can expect to-day — served at the fitting moment, is not a matter of sublime indifference.'* ^MMM^RIi 80 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. That same brilliant face turned round upon Frascr with a laugh ; and the last of the proces- sion vanished in the doorway. Up-stairs the burden of the question was taken up again : *' Where on earth can Frank be all this while ? " It was in the old madame's repainted, spotless rocms, where the ancient mahogany looked so gloomy and heavy ; and like an answer came a sligiit, uncertain stir in the inner room. Mrs. de Laudremont did not hear, leaning listlessly back as she was in madame's own easy- chair in the window ; nor did Arsdne, who stood gazing dismally out of it. *'I. did not know it would all be as new and bald and four-square as it is ! There is not a nook or a corner for a bit of romance about it. Mamma, if tJiis was the sort of home Evangeline was con-ied off from — " But Marie, turning round from the mirror, had caught sight of a little homespun figure hesi- tating on the threshold of the other doorway, with a hand upon the lock, in the act of flight. " There is some one, mamma, who perhaps will know where io find — Frank, can it be vou ?" Frank left the handle of the door, and came forward, half proudly, half shyly. She was made aware of her sister's mistake, by the startled change of tone, as the wearer of *:- A LITTLK MAID OF ACADIE. 81 tho homely frock turned lier face slowly round. Frank was not surprised by the mistake : her only wonder was, that the tall and dainty creature in gray serge and silk, who came rustling to meet her, could be her sister. Yes ; and Arsc^nc, too. Frank certainly felt herself at fault as they embraced her, ai)d exchanged glances with lifted eyebrows quite oyer her head. What a thing it is, the consciousness of a rather washed-out frock I For the first time in her life that consciousness came to Frank, although tho wash -a-oui frocks were by no means new to her. Aui tbuMigh it all, she was led forward until sht stood before the easy-chair in the next room. Then somehow her hands were inLer mother's, and she was being drawn down until the two faces leaned together f^nd there came tho touch of lips upon her brow Only a light, swil touch. Frank had shrunk away a little, unconsciously ; and the eyes fixed Bcarchingly on hers, darkened with pain. The mother felt her shrink, and let her go. The years of separation had opened a gulf be- tween the two. To the mother, it had seemed that at a glanc(\ a touch, it must close, and give her little one, her youngest, back to her. She had not counted on the shortcomings of a child's memorv : its forgetfulness of many things ; its *^6 82 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIK. m readiness to take impressions from tliose near at hand. The grandmother and Marguite had con- fused the image of her mother in Fran9oise's mind, until there remained but the bhirred travesty of her. The mother dimly felt this, without under- standing it ; and lot her go, forcing a smile. **You sec, we have come rather earlier than we expected. We took advantage of the first ex- cursion-boat up the river to the foot of the falls. We were fortunate in finding conveyances of one kind or another in the village, to bring us all f^ut without delay." Frank said nothing, in the pause. She was standing up now before her mother, looking at her with a sort of enforced criticism. Garden roses arc too rare in all this Madawaska region, to offer themselves to the little acadiennc in the way of comparison ; but if she had been familiar with a certain cluster rose of our ac- quaintance, the three faces grouped together be- fore her, would not have failed to suggest it. Marie's ^ flower-like face " brilliant and glowing, as if it had drawn into itself all the best of the air and the sun ; the other two paling out in their different degrees, not as if they were faded, but grown into more or less faint reflections of the other, putting up with that second-best of air and sunshine. I ' Till I A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 83 To the girl's eyes, siiddcTiIy hot with painful tears for her father's loss which this meeting pressed back on her, tlie mother's calm seemed ji serenity untouched by life's hardnesses. Fran- (;oise did not know how hard her young face grew. But her mother did, with one glance at it. The two had no need to say anything more to each other just now ; for Marie was exclaim- ing ** How could you manage to have changed so wilr in all these long years, Frank ? You see, it IS impossible to call you anything but the old name. You are just the same shy little creature ; only, instead of the light ripples all over your head — " touching the sunny waves — " You, must let my maid arrange your hair for dinner, child ; it will be a real pleasure to Elisc to get all this into her hand, for it is not a half satisfaction to her artist-soul," she said, with a laugh, '^ to go to work with the braids and pulTs she has to eke out mine with." "Oh — but yours is such a pretty shade, Marie ! " The first in a little burst of disappoint- ment ; the other in genuine admiration of the red-brown tresses shining with the same warm color as Marie's eyes. Mario threw a not discontented glance over her shoulder into the mirror. "I suppose color does go a long way nowadays ; only it does not ■MMiHKMBiisgninM ma 84 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. in li:W make one a heroine to one's femme de chamhre. But come, mamma, if you don't order us off to our toilets, and bestir yourself about your own, we shall never be ready for dinner, and that is a bad beginning of the new life. Elise shall come to you, Frank, the moment I can spare her. Let her choose your dress for you ; her taste is per- fect." Fran9oise took a fold of her homespun be- tween her fingers, rolling it together in an em- barrassed way. '^ I — I think — 1 won't come down to dinner, Marie." "JSTot come down to dinner!" — the two sisters : the one echoini? the other. "I — this is just about as good as anything I have to wear." Frank said this with a touch of self-asserting pride, lifting her head. *^ Frank!" But the mother, with a certain perceptible effort, as if she were hardly accustomed to inter- fere with Marie's decisions, interposed deprc- catingly. *' Miglit not all that wait, Marie ? Of course, Fran5oise — she has been but a child — her grand- mamma would think. She is half a child ; she will not object to waiting until we can send away for what she needs, to Fredericton or St. John." A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 85 The girl turned with a flash in her eyes. *' The frock is good enough for me. I am not ashamed of it. I do not want to go down to din- ner. I care nothing for your town finery ! " *' Frank !" But she was out of the room in a small whirl- wind. Out of the room, and safe up-stairs in her own old one under the eaves. But not so safe as that, after a while, a tap should not come to her door. Franyoise did not say "^^ Come in" ; no, not when presently the tap was repeated. She held her breath, as she half crouched, half knelt in her deep window. She lifted her head a little, couched on her arms in a listening attitude. Would not the footsteps pass away from her threshold, if she gave no sign ? But the door was opening, and Marie came in, with something gray and histrous trailing from her arm. She gave a start when she saw the small brown leap in the window-seat. She went back and shut the door, and threw her light bur- den across a chair. '*See, Frank, I have something to show you, something I would like your opinion of." When Frank did not stir, Marie went np to her and gave her a friendly shake. " Come, come, wake up ; this will never do }} 8G A UTILE MAiO Ob .\CADIE. And then, stooping over her : " What, tears ? For the shabby gown, child ? Only look here ! " It Avoiild have taken some determined resist- ance to withstand Marie's gentle violence. And as Frank wa.s by no means determined to resist, slie was drawn to her feet, and forward to tiie chair, Marie still holding her hands. *'Tell me, Frank, is it pretty ? Would I look pretty in it, with the ribbons just to match your eyes ? " The child caught her breath. She had never seen anything so dainty in the way of a dress, as that silky gossamer, witli its fringed knots of vio- let, and the lace laid like a faint frost-breath here and there, to soften all. As Marie went forward to shake out a fold, and in so doing let go her hands, Frank clasped them together with a gest- ure of delight. "But it is as pretty as a flower ! I wonder there are no flowers of silver gray like that. May 1 " — suddenly growing shyer — "may I see you in it, when you are dressed ? — with the violet rib- bons and all ? " But when Marie had made her understand that Elise had deftly altered it for Frank herself, the color flamed into her face, and she did not put out a hand, as her sister pushed the chair with its flowing draperies toward her. " Why, what a willful puss it is ! " cried Marie, A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 37 after a imnse of vain expectation. " Come, now, I meant to leave you to Elise, but now I shall see you don this thing myself, for I perceive you are not to be trusted." Frank stood like a rebellious child, one shoul- der raised pettishly, surrendering herself as if a'riid altogether to revolt against her tall sister who had taken her in hand. >S!\e was fingering the gold chain about }icr throat, glad that it was long enough to hide its odd pendant of a silver coin in her bosom, and thus save her from a possible question, as Marie took her by the shoulders, and turned her round, and made a dash at the fasten- ings of the despised frock, whicli she let fall to the floor, as she might have undressed a child. *' Did they mean to keep you an infant al- ways ? — a frock like this ! How old are you, Frank ? Only seventeen ? Well, well, you need not look so penitent ; you will amend of that. Only seventeen, eh ? I suppose, then, we miglit keep Cinderella awhile longer in the nursery chimney-corner — " Marie put her head on one side, with an air of deliberation, as she watched the girl. But seeing relief instead of dismay in the small face, she laughed outright, and rested her two jeweled hands on the girl's pretty, plump, bare shoulders. *' No no, you arc not to get off in that fash- ion ! All these people who have arrived with us. 88 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. you must meet them at dinner, whatever mam- ma said : else it will have a queer look, as if we were hustling j^ou into the background. And you know, my dear, people might then recall the fact that I am only a step-sister, and plain Mary Smith. Fancy ! when I have chosen to be Marie de Landremont ever since I went home to you from school, and found your papa was not at all the typical step-father." rran9oise winced. " Do not let us speak of that, Marie. I never speak of it. I like to think you are my own whole sister, just the same as Ar- s(^nc, or Anne, or Melerente." " You never speak of it ? not even to your great friend Dr. Kendal ? " Frank could not have said that Marie empha- sized those words, though certainly the pressure of the jeweled hands upon her shoulders seemed to lay stress on them. She could feel the sharp setting of the rings. She opened her eyes wnde. " No— oh, no. Why should I ? " " Good child ! " said Marie carelessly, letting her hands fall. " Why should you, indeed ?" She stood looking at her little sister, but in reality not seeing her. Frank would have been startled enough, could she have followed Marie's thoughts. They had gone back a long way ; far- ther than Frank, farthe/ even than Marie could A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. S9 remember. In this old house, which Marie saw now for the first time, her mother's romance had begun. Anne Thibodeau was as young as this little daughter of hers, when first she came here from the States, on a visit to her kindred on the St. John. The romance, indeed, had begun with Fran9ois, not with Jean. It was broken off on Anno Thibodcau's return to St. Louis, whore the girl submitted to a Frenchily-arranged match, tiiat gave her the name of Smith — a name heavily and richly gilded. It was in her early widow- hood that old Madame de Landremont wrote and renewed her invitation, hoping to renew the en- gagement with Franjois. The young widow came back on another visit to the St. John, and fell in love with the wrong brother, and the wrong brother with her. It was a passion that flung everything else to the winds. They were married notwithstanding the old madame's anger, and a provision in the late Mr. Smith's will, by which, in the event of his widow's remarriage, the guar- dianship of his little daughter and his daughter's fortune passed into the hands of his brother. It was not until Mary was rather older than Fran- 9oise now, that she came home to her mother from school. Ilcr father's name was no longer gilded by the fortune her uncle had lost for her ; and it was then that she chose to bo IMarie de Landremont, as she told Franyoiso, finding her 90 A LITTLE MAID OF AC A DIE. \i step-father by no means the typical one. She had liad another re tson for the cliange — the beginning of a new life abroad, utterly broken off from the old one. But this was a reason Marie told to no one. Neither why she had chosen at this time to bring her motlier over here. Marie usually had her reasons, for all she chose sometimes to ap- pear inconsequent enough. As she was in her speech now, patting Frank's shoulder : " After all, Frank, I am no cruel step-sister, any more than Ars^ne. We are well-disposed creatures, on the whole, who mean to be good to Cinderella — so long as she does not step in and carry off the prince," she added, with a flashing smile of satisfaction at her own image in the glass. " Who is the prince, Marie ?" The elder sister started, and colored slightly. It was not her wont to be embarrassed ; but there was just a hint of confusion in her laugh. '' The prince, child ? Who knows — perhaps he has been \ aiting for me all this while, up hero in the skirts of the forest ? There, now, Cinder- ella is dressed for the ball, and she may come and look at herself in the mirror." A worm-eaten oval, with plenty of blurred rings over its once bright surface, it yet gave Frank a full-length vision which, advancing to- ward her, fairly bewildered her. h ill A LITTLE MAID OF AC A DIE. 91 She put her hands across her eyes ; then looked again, as if this time slie expected some different reflection. There it was still ; all silvery and white and golden, as Marie lightly pulled tlie pin out of the loosely-knotted hair, and let down the whole in a bright flood. There needed no other sunshine to light up the whole picture. *' So you, too, think it charming, Frank?" Marie was laughing, nodding at the mirror. '* Such nonsense, that ' beauty unadorned,' isn't it ? Of course it will not do to pose outright for Little Goldilocks" — touching the bright waves with soft, admiring hand — "but Elise will see at once how to do it in some graceful, girlish way ; you know it is well not to go over seventeen. It won't do for you to be ^out' yet; you are too young to go out." Frank turned round with startled eyes. "Not go out — too young to go out!" she cried, breaking into French in her dismay. " Moi, who go out every day and all day long ! I don't see what you are laughing at ! " she cried, begin- ning with trembling hands to unfasten the won- derful robe which had turned into fetters all at once. " But if you think I am going to be kept indoors because of your fine clothes ! I would like to know — " Marie good-naturedly gathered up over her arm IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) V / O MP.r 1.0 I.I 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.25 1.4 1.6 ^ 6" — ► <^ w /} "-},. '?%. ">/ ■> O / /A Photographic Sciences Corporation J ,v i3 WEST MMIN STREET WEBSTt.. NY 14580 (716) 872-4503 \^'^ w- 92 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. I %>d^ w the dress Frank spurned aside with her foot. She gave a reassuring pat to the child's dimpled shoul- der ; which, however, was brusquely shrugged out of reach. " You must let me laugh a little, when you say 'saouaire' for ^savoir,' my little F'enchwom- an. What a small termagant it is I Don't do that before Ars6ne or mamma, my dear ; you would frighten them. Don't you know it is an impossibility to stamp one's foot, or to — kick — anything out of one's way, even though it chance to be a toilet from Paris ? Now I wonder if you are not the only girl of seventeen in the whole civilized world ignorant of the great meaning of that word *out'?" Marie went on to explain it. "Now that Anne is married to her German baron," she add- ed, "and keeps Melcrente with her — twins are so absurdly inseparable ! — it is your turn. But first you should have some lessons, wherever mam- ma settles next winter. Oh, yes, of course no- body could winter here. It was just a whim of mine, our coming now, instead of sending for you. Your letters put it into my head ; and as mamma was glad to come — But about you," she re- sumed, as if mamma's wishes were hardly worth dwelling on — " no doubt you have had a govern- ess, or master — " She made a pause at the last word, with a ■M A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 93 sharp, furtive glance at Frank, while apparently absorbed in smoothing out a knot of ribbon on the dress. " No, I never had a governess. But I have liad lessons ; you know I wrote you monsieur Ic docteur — " **0h, of course!" Marie affected a slight yawn. *' The village apothecary ; I suppose chem- istry was part of the course ? Did you find the lessons interesting ?" "Until the snow went, and the sunny days and flowers came. I like those much better than the books," Fran^oise confessed. And then, with compunction: " but that is not good to say, after all monsieur le docteur's trouble." ** This kind old doctor — he is not young ?" *' Oh, no," the girl said promptly ; *' I should lliink he must be as old as — oh, suppose, as old a3 Uncle Frank was, that once when he came to see us in Liverpool. I've thought he was like Uncle Frank." **Like— " Marie repeated the word sharply. "Franr (^ois de Landremont was fair, like you." " But it was not in face, that I meant ; it was in kindness, in goodness to me. Marie, if I had known nothing, just nothing at all, when you came : if monsieur le docteur had not taught me- w 94 A litttj: maid of acadie. Marie's face lost the hard lines which for a moment had sharpened every feature. She drew a long, deep breath. It might have been a sigh of relief, but she turned it into another half-sup- pressed yawn, as if deprecating school-girl con- fidences. " Time enough, child, to learn all our several attainments ; just now we must have more regard to the adornment of the person than the mind. I am off, and will send Elise to you as soon as I can spare her." When Elise had completed her transformation- scene with rran(;oise, she had a message to deliver, that mademoiselle was to stop in her mother's room on her way down-stairs. Fran^oise started obediently enough. But when she had reached a certain angle in the passage, and heard unfamiliar voices beyond it, the little heart which was flutter- ing like a bird's under all this borrowed plumage, failed her utterly. She turned and fled down a side stairway — " out," out at last. The kmdly twilight blurred with its own gray chadows the small gray figure flitting along, until the gnarled apple-tree outside the gate bent its bough obligingly, offering her a nest secure from observation. She took it unhesitatingly, in her ignorance of Parisian toilets ; and sat lightly swaying to and fro, with no more thought for silk than for homespun. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIIJ. 95 She had enough to occupy her otherwise. Her lumd had stolen up to her throat, twisting and untwisting the gold chain to which she had linked tho coin so lightly flung to her by Dallas Eraser. But she was not thinking of Dallas Frascr now ; only of her mother, of that averted glance in her mother's eyes, as she looked at her. After all these years ! That was the way her mother met her, after all these years ! The poor, passionate child was covering up her hot face, even from the calming touch of the cool evening air. She was not crying, she was not even thinking ; she was only aching with a wild longing to escape, from herself, from the contending feelings that were fairly tearing her heart to pieces between them. She buried her head deeper in her arms. Per- haps it was that slight silken stir of hers : she missed a step that quickened to her across the road. ''Frank—" " monsieur le docteur ! And I wanted you so much ! " ''Frank, were you then thinking of me ?'* "Eh, not at the moment," she admitted re- luctantly, lest he should go on to ask what she was thinking of. "Not at the moment. But then I am always wanting you, you see, whenever I am lonely. And a big houseful makes one 96 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. ffjf; loneliest of all, don't you think so ? You have been in the villaf^c — you have heard of the arrival ? But how did you over know rac, monsieur, in this disguise ? Only see here ! " She was standing before him now, and she gave the folds of her dress a toss out over the road-side weeds. *' Would you have known your Cinderella, if you had had a good look at her so, instead of stumbling over her huddled all together as she migiit have been among the ashes in the chimney- corner ? " lie did not answer. lie was looking at her in a silence at which the girl said, disappointedly : *' I thoufdit YOU would like it. It seemed to mo I looked a little pretty in it. Not as Mario would have looked, of course, but still — " Suddenly Kendal had both her hands fast in his. "/s it my Cinderella ? my Cinderella, whether she wear cotton or silk!'* And then, as the startled pose of her head warned him of his vehe- mence, **This is silk?'- he said, in a lighter tone. "And you are enjoying it, and all the other pretty things of your new life ? But why are you out here alone, a little, solitary figure that drew me across to you as I was passing ?" "Passing?" No one knew better than she, that this road A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 97 led nowhere else ; and she told him so. " Where could you be passing to, monsieur ? You can't pass to anywhere by our road." "Well, then — "laughing, and speaking out, as if driven into a corner — '*I suppose * passing,' freely translated, means coming this way in the hope of seeing you." **Then I am glad I came out. I wish you were coming in. I wish — " She broke off with a confusing flash of mem- ory, anent Marie's mention of the village apothe- cary. " Do you wish it, Frank ? Would it make a difference in your enjoyment of your new life ? " Ue had palod a little, waiting for the answer. But he need not havj feared it. '*0h, so much difference!" said thj clear, prompt voice. " I am frightened of the new life. I wish we were back in the fire-lit kitchen to-night, with tante Marguite asleep in the chimney-corner, and the sound of bonhomme Pacifique's axe outside ringing through the stillness, and coming iu to you and me sitting at the dresser, over our books." She was swaying again on her apple-bough seat. The faint new moon, still pallid in the twilight, flung the leaves in dancing shadows on the bright head and lightly folded hands. Some- 1 -., n A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. m I mi^i j thing in the demure attitude helped lier words to carry Kendal back to a certain Avinter evening in the old kitchen, when the dancing firelight had flickered on the sunny hair, and face half-blush- ing and half-mischievous. " The books — the lessons — Frank, I tried once, and but once, to teach you one which afterward I thought I had no right to do. I have kept silence since then. But now everything is changed — I have had news — it is no longer a hard, bare life that I would offer you. But what am I saying ? — it is not for silver and gold that my little girl will come to me, if come she does. Only, I have the right to try to win her now, if it is not too late. Is it too late, Frank ? Can we net go back to that night by tlie fire, when old Marguite pulled out her spinning-wheel between us, and you said — Frank, you said the lesson was easy, and you did not mean to forget it. Have you forgotten ? I iove — " ** ' Thou lovest — ' " she put in promptly, with a mocking yet unsteady laugh, willfully misunder- standing him. "Eh, monsieur mon maitre, you arc too much given to review-lessons ; I learned my verbs long, long ago ! " He made no answer, even by a movement ; and his face could not speak for him, for it was in shadow, as he leaned against the fence, under the boughs. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 99 The silence frightened her. She put out her hand, with a shy touch upon his arm. ** As if I could not remember, without that !" she said, under her breath. **If I go away for a little while, Frank — " The light touch tightened into a clinging clasp, and her other hand stole up, and the small fingers locked themselves over his arm. "Going away p" There was dismay enough in the tone, to sat- isfy any lover, however exacting. For the first time Kendal looked without a misgiving into the young face raised toward him ; into the eyes glinting with a sudden rush of tears, and down upon the quivering mouth — would a kiss comfort it, as it would a child's ? But he onlv answered : "Going away, but to come nearer, Frank. Just a little while ; and then will you give me such a welcome to your parlor as you used to the old kitchen ? " " That I will — always ! " There was a ring of defiance in her tone. Marie might say what slie would : Frank would never give up her friend — this one friend that she had — were he a thou- sand times village apothecary, "That I will — always I " she said. " And you take me on faith ; when you know so little of me, really ? " "W 100 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. She shrugged her shoulders carelessly. ** Why should I know anything of you, when I know you ? " " But you have the right, Frank ; and perhaps I have heen wrong not to have told you every- thing. But it is a i)ainful story — " "Then do not tell me," she said (piickly, with a shrinking movement, as if from the pain he spoke of. " Oh, not to you, there is no i)ain in it for you. It is only a bitter memory ; a ghost that will be laid forever, when I have told it you. But let it rest until I come back, if you will. You have not asked me where I am going, Frank," ho said, with a movement of his hand dismissing the subject, and tiie ghost with it. "And yet 1 am going a long way." "A long way ?" " Even into the States." " Into the States ! But why ? " "To seek my fortune," he said, lightly. " What ! you never have guessed tliat I am what you people here call an Ameritchain ? But it is no wonder you did not know it : I myself have tried so hard to forget it." "But you have been a Canadian — almost an Acadian — this long time," she said, eagerly. *- Yes, ever since I fled across the border out of prison." 4fr;. A LITTLE MAID OV ACADIK. 101 There was a laugliin;]^, tone in liis voice ; but, for all the twilight, he was watching her to see the cfTcct of his words. Thjy had absolutely noue, beyond an impa- tient movement of her shoulder. She found idle jesting out of place while he was speaking of go- ing away. " You will not be long, monsieur ? I — they are all so different from me — I shall feel so alono until you come back." There could have been no more marked differ- ence, one would have said, than between this dark, grave man older than his years, and the little, young creature looking wistfully up at him. But just now he saw the difference as little as she. ■€ *' Long ? — the hours will be davs, and the davs weeks. But as time is counted, it will not be long before I come back to claim my little wife." ft He saw her start at that last word. *' What does it mean, then ? Frank, arc you not to be mv wife ?" ' "One day ; oh, yes. But it is much too soon to think of that. People may be — engaged — ^ a long while first. I — Need we think of that now. Dr. Kendal?" He hastened to reassure her, half-smiling him- self, although the glow had passed from his face. ** Not until you choose ; you shall not think of anything until you choose," he told her, sooth- ■—- » 102 A LITTLE MAID OF ACUDIE. ingly. ** But, Frank, there arc oue or two things which people — engaged — do sometimes, but you have not done." *' I am sure I did not know. There are so many things I don't know," she said, na'ivcly. *• I wish you would just tell me when I am wrong, monsieur le doetcur." ** There, then." lie shook his head gravely. *'My name is John," he said. *'0h, but I couldn't !" she cried, rather ir- rclovantlv. *'And then, Frank, at parting, people who arc — engaged — do sometimes — " lie might have told her without words, as he bent his head. But she drew her breath in such a hurried, frightened way, that he stopped. ** You do not love me then, Frank, at all ?" Of course she loved him. And he was going away. An instant's pause, a little struggle with her- self, and she put up her mouth to be kissed, as frankly as a child might do. Did he not understand her ? For, after all, ho only took her hands in a firm grasp a moment, and then went away. He did not even look back as he went ; though she sat there with her hand raised to wave him a last farewell, when he should reach the wooded corner where the lane met the hiojh-road. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 103 Five minutes later she wiis up-stairs, and slip- ping again into her despised homespun frock. For, after all, she belonged to the old days, not the new ; to tlie village doctor, to homespun, to the kitchen chimney-iorner, and tantc Marguito. As she stole down-stairs and out-of-doors once more, she could hear dinner being served in merry picnic fashion, in the big weaving; »om, which had been turned into a dining-hall. >> **Tante Marguite- '•Eh!'' The old woman look 'd round with a start, tilting the saucei)an as she set it down on the glowing coals on her own licartii. *• Mam- sellc, it's never you ! At this hour of the even- ing ! What are you doing hero ? " "I have made my escape." The girl came in across the threshold, with a nod, and took posses- sion of the arm-chair in the w^indow. " They put me in their fetters, but I broke loose from them." '* Fetters, mamselle Franguaise ! " Marguite looked capable of believing anything of Madame Jean. *' Fetters, tante Marguite ; or perhaps I should say, prison-dress. It was very pretty, all rustle and ribbons ; but it cramped me. So I have stolen away from it, while all those strangers are up at the house ; and you must take mo in." ^ I — P"^™^ 104 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. *' But, mamsellc, Madame Jean — " " Grandmamma said I might, you know very well, Marguite. You must go up to the house, and tell Madame Jean," the girl said, with a little willful nod. "Or there is Pacifique — he can go." Pacifi(iue was coming in with an armful of wood. lie gave a sort of subdued purr of satis- faction when he saw the young mistress: in her homely frock. *' So they haven't made a fine lady of you all at once, mamsellc ? That's well ; but why have you sent monsieur le docteur away ? I met him on the road, and when 1 told him it would please my old woman well to see him at this time, that she had Tnp:,h to try her nerves, he said he was leaving the village, and we must send for the doctor down Tobique-way. Faites excuse, mon- sieur le docteur ! " — Pacifique shook his solemn head, taking both hands to straighten out his stiff rheumatic leg, as he deposited the wood on the hearth — "but the short-cut into the next world, over the twelve hundred and fifty leagues under- ground, into the kingdom of the demon, that a poor sinner would be sure to find, that goes to him down Tobique-way." Frank laughed ; and then grew grave as sud- denly. " Gone away ! — " she said, under her breath. A LITTLE 51AID OF ACADIE. 105 There was an odd sound of respite in the words. And then she colored hotly : because she was a just a little shy of being engaged, need that make her ungrateful ? After all, Mnrguite was not able to resist the opportunity of standing face to face Avith her old enemy, Madame Jean, with the advantage on her (Marguitc's) side. It was an advantage, certainly, th.at mamsello had come over to Marguitc's faction. Tiie sense of this accounted for the ready wel- come accorded by the old woman, and the alacrity with which she bound on her best high white cap, and marched up to the house, prepared to do bat- tle, in mamselle's cause, with Madame Jean. But no battle ensued. It was not Madame Jean whom Marguitc saw ; but a bright-eyed, bland, quick-witted young lady, with a laugh in her glance that took the quaint old body in from head to foot ; and a ready acquiescence in the proposal which was meant for a declaration of v/ar — that mamselle Francoise should remain for the present at the cottage. A very sensible thing, mamselle Marie declared, with n smiling nod ; a very sensible thing, until Elise — a perfect treasure in an emergency was Elise — should have a proper wardrobe comfortably in readiness for Fran5oisc. "And — I threw my cap over the mills," Mar- guite said, on recounting the story afterward, ■"/ . \ 106 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. winding it up after the manner of the nurser}^- tales. She could never be got to say how the in- terview ended. Perhaps on her side it was as well that mamselle Marie was not clear as to the Mad- awaska patois ; and had a very indistinct idea as to what ''le jeoblo " in the old woman's muttered farewell had to do with "le diable." VIII. It " The dome Dean It rins its lane, And every seven year it gets anc." Frank stands still, leaning both her arms against the railing of the suspension-bridge, and gazing with suspended breath down on the falls spanning the whole river above. Just those three deluging days of steady down- pour preceding this one of brilliant sunshine, have done this ; covering the hurly-burly of stones strewing the river-bed, and sending a brimming flood from brink to brink. Down into the chasm it thunders ; and there, under cover of the rolling clouds of spray, it gathers, and whirls away be- A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 107 neath the bridge, and through the winding fast- nesses of the gorge beyond. The bridge is shaking with the clamor of it ; and the girl, as she watches, is in a quiver of ex- citement. For the sudden rise in all the forest-streams has offered another opportunity this season for the lumber men above to float the logs down into the St. John. The river is almost at half-freshet ; and near the bridge, where the rock-walls draw together, a pine-trunk, sucked under by the cataract, is spewed out of that foaming mouth, and goes spinning down the whirlpool, the great mill that grinds away the bark, and leaves it stripped and bare to float on to some boom, it may be a hundred miles below. There is a boom anchored in the river above the falls — trunk after trunk chained end to end in a long, wavering line, within which the others settle themselves into intricate mosaics. Frank stands watching the busy scene : the hur- rying logs ; the smooth sheen of the treacherous current drawing them toward the brink ; the swift canoe, manned by two lumber men, rushing to the rescue, and here and there dragging into the boom some errant log which they tow by means of a dog and chain made fast to the canoe. How deft they are ! How — The dead trunk of what must once have been ?^*r» ("v ,1 m 108 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. a monarch of the woods, thrusts the other logs aside, and sweeps on past the boom — on and on, straight for the fulls, faster and faster as it goes. The canoe has shot out in pursuit : the " dog " has gripped the log ; but the current has it too, and the current at that point is deadly strong. One breathless moment. Afterward, Frank might know how her clinging to the rail became a passionate grasp, in her suspense, until the ten- der palms were bruised. But just now she is un- conscious of herself — conscious of nothing but that terrible struggle before her. Man's power against Nature's. A struggle for life and death it is, after the first. For life and death it is, that the men in the canoe dip their paddles, striving for every inch of treacherous water that misrht bear them back agam. One breathing-space, and fate appears to pause. Canoe and log are motionless. The migh^v strength of arm put forth by the powerful lum- ber men, if insuflBcient to draw them backward out of harm's reach, still holds them from their doom. And now — slowly, slowly at first — the current, unseen like the resistless forces of Nature, has them in its grip, and draws and draws them on. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 109 Frank's blue C3'cs, wide with horror, fasten on the man who stands up in the canoe to strike one last blow for life : to break the chain which binds them to the log swimming lightly away with them to the brink of death. Slie sees him grasp hi, axe, and, with all his force, strike at the chain. But the iron glances on the iron ; the axe misses — hurls itself out of his unnerved hands into the sleek water. The man — Frank sees his hoary head bowed down — drops on his knees in the canoe. His comrade, a dark silhouette against the stream be- ginning to gleam with the first tranquil mother- of-pearl shimmer of sunset, never moves in his seat, except for the strong arms which ply the paddle as resolutely as if, in spite of every stroke, the canoe were not bearing them on swiftly and more swiftly to destruction. All Frank's powers of hearing, of seeing, are absorbed in the frail birchen thing floating so smoothly yonder. If anything else were floating on that glassy mirror, she would not know whether it were stray log or driftwood tangle. Stray log or driftwood tangle, or another boat that shoots out from the bank ? Shoots out ; speeds like an arrow far across the river, between the canoe and the unseen fate reaching up after it out of the current. ,-,:*•. 4f^ 110 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. Once more the flash of an axe glints like a spark in the red sunset drifting down-stream ; and, this time, it does not miss its mark. The chain is broken ; the log, with nothing now to hold it back, flees to the brink so fast that it is all Frank's eyes can do to follow it. For she forces her eyes to follow it ; the ten- sion of suspense, in watching those two boats, is become more than she can bear. There is a terror even in this watching of hers : a heart-sickening dread, as she sees the black line sliding over the brink which makes one shining curve as clear and smooth and mo' onless as a great arch of frozen water. The snow-drifts of spray beat up against it, snatching at that black line, whatever it may be, and burying it deep. Below, the swaths of water fall apart ; through the clear brown rapids there heaves up a black something : it may be the jagged peak of a rock below. The seething waves have gulped it down. For one dizzy instant Franyoise catches her breath again, doubting whether the shapeless thing that spins before her eyes is log or canoe. It is a shout from the bank that reassures her — a thin thread of sound, shrill through the tor- rent's roar, that makes itself just faintly heard. She steadies herself, clinging with both hands to the rail, and looks again for the canoes. (IWK^ , A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. Ill They are not where she left them. They have broken that thread of fate which unseen drew I hem toward tJie abyss. When she sees them again, they arc skimming side by side back to'the bank, where a group of villagers already gathers. The voices can not reach her through the torrent's tumult ; but she can see the eager ges- ticulations, and here and there can recognize some one she knows. She never moves, clinging to the rail, and looking — looking — "It is the etlanger," a voice said close beside her, speaking in French. The stranger— the sent of God, as the Breton fore fathers of the Acadians were wont to say. i'rank started and turned. But the words were not addressed to her. She was hardly even ob«":rved by the two, an Indian and a Frenchman, who were passing over the bridge, their tread deadened by the reverberation of the falls. It was the Indian who was speaking as they went by. The stranger ; yes, she knew it was Dallas Fraser whom she had seen flinging his life away to save the two lumber-men. After a little, she roused herself, and turned away, homeward ; for she could see the scattered groups dispersing, and some of these might be coming across the bridge. € r SH *r»-- i: 'k ' 112 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. # But, she was trembling with excitement still ; and presently, wlicn she heard steps behind her, round tlie bend in the road, she turned aside into the bordering tliicket, putting up her hands to her hot cheeks, which the branching greenery veiled completely from the passer-by. "When she saw tliat it was Dallas Fraser saun- tering along, his hands in the pockets of his shooting-jacket, his head thrown sliglitly back with a gesture of which she already knew the trick — the sun in his fair, frank face, and alto- gether a careless look of happy ease about the whole man — for an instant she doubted the evi- dence of her own eyes : that he had but just struggled back from the very brink of death. But, after all, why should he not be at ease with himself and all the world ? Had not all gone so well with him, that Heaven and earth must be glad of him ? With a swift impulse, the girl stretched out her hands toward him ; then suddenly let them fall, her color brightening, her faint smile deep- ening mischievously. For he was whistling, as he went by, beyond the screen of underwood which she had only put forth her hand to part, but had not parted ; and the air of the song was one which he had learned from her. He was doing it very badly, in a way that A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 113 spoko ill for his musical memory ; but the air he had heard only the other day, down by the wells : *' ' Tu t'en vaa, tu dolaisscs ta pcrsonnc, Lcs promcsscs sont dc3 angros : Tu. in' avas proiuid la foi bonne — ' What th3 dickens are * angros,' by-thc-way?" he said, breaking off as ho perceived that he had lost the tune. And he passed on, round the fringe of alders. **But, Marguerite, the child ?" " The child " had crossed the bit of greensward from the farm-road, and now stood on the thresh- old of Marguite's open door, looking within at the two who were seated before the hearth, in the full light of the dancing fire. The great iron kettle was humming cheerily, swinging on the crane ; a savory stew was sim- mering away on a glowing bed of coals ; there was the smell of bread baking in the brick oven which was hollowed out in the side of the chimnev, and had been heated red-hot with a fire kindled in it, now removed to make room for the loaves. Alto- gether, with the shining floor, and the gay, be- flowered home-made mats scattered about it, and the ample dame seated in the firelight at her low spinning-wheel, her bundle of flax at her knee. .', !. .» 114 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. the whole was as cozy a picture of homely com- fort as one need hope to find. But the other figure opposite — the one in the scat of honor, the big, upholstered easy-chair — looked far from comfortable. There was a flush on her delicate face, which was evidently less due to the fire than to some plain speech of her com- panion's ; and the slightly drooping figure in its sheeny black, with the gauzy scarf falling back from the soft hair a little faded though not gray, had a deprecating air about it, which was also in the voice that said : " But, Marguerite, the child — " " Eh, Madame Jean, the child is well enough. She is with the folk she has always known. She need not be in haste to change — to put herself into the kneading-trough, for mamselle Marie to make what she will of her. Better a bit of good, sound, honest bread, than all those kickshaws mamselle Marie'll twist her into, if she has to break off a pinch here, and a corner there, to shape it to her will." ** Certainly she has comers enough," said the mother, with a faint sigh ; really to herself, for she had remarked that the sharp old woman was rather dull of hearing. But the girl in the door- way heard her. It may be doubted whether Marguite did not see the girl, she was so careful not to glance that A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 115 way. But Madame Jean's back was turned upon the hesitating figure. ** Lachuelle ? Mamsollc Marie, is it ? " Mar- guite asked, in the country patois. There was no one who had fewer corners, nor was more smoothly rounded, than tliis same Marie, as Marguite well knew. **Mamselle Marie, is it? And is that why Madame Jean has not yet married her : qii'elle sdche stir pied?" Madame Jean rose, a little wearily. There was a keen zest for Marguite in these ambushed sorties on the enemy ; but Madame Jean did not care even to act on the defensive. She was re- treating in order, gathering her draperies about her, and answering absently : ** You were saying — ? But it is growing dark ; I must not stay to talk. You will say to my girl, for me, Marguite — " Turning, she faced Fran^oisc. If she had been prepared, she might have met her after the fashion of the other day ; but, taken by surprise as she was, all the mother in her moved her to put out her arms, and draw the child to her breast in a long, close embrace. And all the child in Frangoise for one moment made her cling there. Then suddenly the pressure of the soft, round arms relaxed, and the mother at once let her go. , i 116 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. FraiKjoiso stood apart, looking at licr with fire in her eyes. Had she trapped her into the caress : this fair, soft, gentle mother, whom she could so love, if to love her did not mean to be false to the father ? If these two had been alone with one another, perhaps they might have come together readily enough ; but tante Marguite's presence in the background was as if it thrust them apart. To Frank, she was a breathing warning (rather a hard-breathing, not to say contemptuously sniffing one) not to forget her allegiance to the father who would still have been leal and true to Uncle Frank, if a soft face and a light faith had not tempted him aside. And Fran9oiso must not be tempted to sur- render at a glance. Though she would not have said this, even to herself, it was this that chilled her manner, while her heart was aglow within her, and the red burn- ing in her cheeks, and a light, half-warm, half- angry, kindling in the blue eyes uplifted to her mother^s dark ones. Yes, they were dark, like Marie's and Ar- s^ne's ; Frank, the only blue-eyed, fair-haired one among them all, hardly seemed to count among her children. -t "Mignonne," her mother was saying (an old name which Frank had half forgotten), " if it had ^ .*«■■■ A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 117 d Ar- ed one imoTig in old it had not been for these stormy days, in wliich I would not bring you out, I should liavo come for you before. Mario took too much upon herself — " with a faint, unconscious sigh, as if that were not altogether abnormal for Afarie — "too much upon herself, in giving consent for me that you should bo away from us. Your place is with your mother now. To be apart from you, mignonne — to have you look upon me as a stranger — child, it is mr ; ? than I can bear ! " Frank's color camo and went. She put her hand to her throat, with a catch in her breath, before she couhl say, quietly : "You must give me time, mamma. I — you have been a stranger all thebC years — " she burst forth. " How am I else to think of you ? I don't know anything else." "You can not remember how I loved my youngest, my baby ? " the mother said. " I remember you sent me away." " You were your father's legacy to his old mother, rran9oise. As for me, I knew it would not do. But he thought so." There was no touch of blame for him in her voice ; but the hot flame in Fran9oise's cheeks was veering, blown by gusts of passion. " If he thought so—" That was reason enough for Franyoise ; and for her mother too, for she said meekly : -ym f- ^^m. -% -^ 118 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. " He thought so ; and wheii he asked me, I could give up my rights to his mother in her old age. Although I knew it would not do." *' If \e thought so, it must have been best." Madame Jean slowly shook her head. She was not conscious of the movement. She was only conscious of how often her Jean's impetuous, un- considered will had gone astray. For when Jean had wanted anything, he had wanted it abso- lately ; he would never stop to question nor to weigh. From the time he had wooed the young widow in hot haste, putting aside his brother's leisurely beginnings, sweeping her as it were from all her moorings, in his vehemence — "If he thought so, it must have been best," the daughter was saying. And Madame Jean locked her lips upon those memories of hers. *' That is all over now, mignonne. What we have to do now is to arrange our lives for the present." "And for the present, mamma, to do as Marie said : to leave me the week out here, to — to get used to things — and to — to be made pre- sentable." She said this with such a clear imitation of Marie's voice and manner, that Madame Jean, who was not without the fear of Marie before her eyes, faltered. /•'■' ^'i ^>' }0' A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 119 Frank saw her advantage and pressed it ; which perhaps she would not have done, but for her mothers hesitation. At any rate, she got the week ; Marie's prom- ise was confirmed when her mother turned to go away. Franyoise, as she went, stood in the doorway, looking after the graceful, slightly drooping figure with its fluttering black draperies against the gray twilight. Her mother's kiss was warm upon her lips. "One takes more flies wiih hon9y th-^n with vinegar," old Marguite said, proverbially, over her shoulder, watching the black draperies too. Frank made no answer ; only turned nway, and appropriated the old woman's spinning- wheel, which she set briskly in motion. She fell to humming, with a touch of defiance of tears in her voice, as she drew out the shining thread : " Le grandp^rc et la grand 'mfere, lis avaiont danse ze deux tout vi6— pansez, fils, et accordez, fi', Epargnez pas vos soulicrs — " I .., '4 120 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. IX. " Little EUie sits alone 'Mid the beeches of a meadow, By a stream side, on the grass ; And the trees are showering down Doubles of their leaves in shadow On her shining hair and face. She has thrown her bonnet by, And her feet she has been dipping In the shallow water's flow — Now she holds them nakedly In her hands, all sleek and dripping. While she rocketh to and fro." Just this one more day of freedom ! The girl was saying this to herself, determined to make the most of it. A thoroughly idle day ; not even a pretense of a book, to lend it a sensible and profitable air. For monsieur le docteur wr.3 away : what was the use of reading ? She sauntered lightly through the wood, swing- ing the little green and white Indian basket of sweet-hay that held the lunch she had wheedled out of tante Marguite. She thought of the old woman gratefully ; but for her, would she still be free to spend this last day in dreaming the golden hours away, as in the olden time ? The olden time lay less than a year behind A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 121 wr.3 thind her ; yet it seemed very long ago, so much hud happened since. Here she was, pushing her way up the stony hollow where she had first seen Kendal flounder- ing in the stream. But how altered since then ! The very stream in its course babbled of change, as it poured now in full flood over the rocks be- tween which it had dribbled months ago. The stepping-stones which she had used that evening, were submerged ; the long, shingly beeches were nowhere to be seen, and the clear brown water pressed up nearly to the rolled green border of the alder-thicket : " Suinmer is i-cumin', Loude singe cuckoo — " Frank could hear the songster very plainly from the old barrens beyond the alder-brake. So much was in those barrens ! The birds, the thrushes and the warblers, delight in them — and so indeed do the bears, though they prefer the more secluded ones, for their peaceful banquet on the fragrant strawberries, the red raspberries, and the big blueberries with the bloom upon them, so plentifully spread amid the fire-weed. The wild fruits spring up fast in the open, where for- est-fire on forest-fire has cleared and cleared again the way for a rotation of such crops. And Frank knew where the asters and the ferns and pitcher- 122 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. plant grow best, and the sweet little pink-and- whito " twin-sisters " trail close to the ground, at the edge of the damp old hard-wood belt that had refused to burn. The " twin-sisters " — " Mcl- erente-and-Anne," she had always called them. All these things drew her across to them irre- sistibly. But how ? There were the stepping-stones ; but there, also, was the water over them. Franyoise looked at it and looked at them, and ended by sitting down on the pebbled bank of the stream, and in a moment springing up again, her skirts kilted about her, her shoes and stockings in her hand, and a pair of the prettiest little white feet in the world twinkling through the sunny reach of water on the stepping-stones. Once she slipped on the smooth-worn rock, but recovered herself instantly. It was more than an instant, however, before she found out that, in righting her balance, she had let fall not only her freshly gathered tuft of bluebells, but one of the shoes tucked, as she thought, safely under her arm. She did not know, until her careless glance was caught by something bobbing up and down upon the eddy. An odd little black boat, that had a bluebell nodding in it, by way of passenger. At least that is how it gets itself described pres- ently. But first, she sprang to a stone nearer, and ' .V-' A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 123 reached out after it in such haste that she jeop- ardized her footing again. She might have lost it altogether, with the great start she gave, when round the bend a canoe shot past her, in the nar- row channel. She had reached the nearest bank in haste before she saw the man in the canoe was Dallas Fraser. Less than a moment, and he had capt- ured her runaway craft, and was presenting it to her with a remark as to its sailing qualities. But the girl had made herself deftly ready to dispossess the bluebell, and thrust her trim little blue-woolen-stockinged foot into its place. Dal- las tried not to watch the operation too fixedly, but steadied the canoe on his pole among the ed- dies, as he said : "And so at last I have found you again ! " "It conies like March in Lent, monsieur," she said coolly — "to find me in the woods." "And I did not know that ! I have been watching village and road for a trace of you ; have even been down to your school-room among the rapids — " "With your fine ladies from the house ?" " My fine ladies I " " Oh, well, they are yours," she said, lightly, " in the sense of being at hand there for your idle moments, when the serious business of fishing is over for the day. I am glad I was not in my 121 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. school-room, as you call ifc, when you brought them there. They would have found nie in the way." " It was not I who brought them there. Every one goes down to see the wells in the foot- rocks. But why should they have found you in the way ? " " They always have." ''They always have ?" Frank flushed scarlet. "What was she saying ? Telling her family secrets to this stranger ! "They always have?" he repeated. And then, catching inspiration from the rush of color which dyed the round white throat and the fair outline of her cheek, as she turned her head aside — "Except Frank!" he cried. "This Frank de Landremont — this youth whom I have chanced to hear his sisters mention once or twice, but who seems somehow mysteriously invisible to his guests — this Frank finds himself in your way very often, does he not ? " A puzzled glance from under the long, dark lashes, at first ; and then a sudden smile dimpling about the corner of her mouth. " Very often — " demurely. And — come, confess — it is on this Frank's II account that the ladies up at the house — " He hesitated there. Of course, he could not A. LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 125 echo her own words of a moment iigo. But while he hesitated, she said, coolly : *' Find me in the way ? Yes, truly ; on ac- count of Frank." ** You must know him very well, indeed !'* ** But yes, 1 suppose I must. Rather better than any one else does, at least." *' And — no doubt vou are fond of him ?" The words escaped him in a little outburst of jealous impatience, which perhaps he did not un- derstand himself, and certainly the girl did not. She answered in an off-hand way : " Oh, yes, indeed ! Only — isn't it odd ? — I do get just a little tired sometimes of the constant companionship. You like to get rid of everybody sometimes, you know ; and to have any one per- petually haunting you — " " I'm unlucky," interposed Fraser, sardoni- cally. " I've not yet seen this ubiquitous Frank. Do you say the same thing to him of me ? " She lifted her brows. " Of you ! How could I, monsieur ? Me, who have met you but three times and two halves ?" " Three times and two halves ! " he repeated, laughing at her computation. "Pray, how is that ? I am sure my memory is at least as good as yours upon that subject, and I am ready to swear to thrice. As for the half-times — " "But that was when the meeting was only 126 A LITTLE SIAID OF ACADIE. half-way ; all on one side, monsieur understands ? First, on that same day of the great arrival at the house : the carriages were rolling up to the gate, and I was hiding behind the beaucoup — '* " The beaucoup ?" *'(^a! I mean what old Kiel MacNiel calls the muckle rain-cask, at the corner of the house. I was standing there, watching monsieur." She was unconscious of the subtle flattery in the admission, or her next words might have had more meaning in them, and not have been said quite carelessly : " You know it is something to see any stran- ger at all. Or you would know, if you lived with tante Marguite.*' "Poor child, it is a weary life, then ?" " Oh, not to say weary ; only the same thing, always the same thing over and over again. It is the song of the Korils, those elfish dwarfs away in old Bretagne." And she began to sing : " Lindi, mardi, mercrcdi, Lindi, mardi, mercredi — " Dallas Fraser glanced at her quickly, when she began, the clear voice like a bird's piercing through the woodland solitudes. If he had only told her at first that he was not absolutely alone here, as she doubtless sup- posed him — that nearly the whole house-party A LITTLE MAID 01-' ACADIE. 12' had wandered out here, canoeing, fishing, camp- ing out, as such a party can merrily enough, in the skirts of the forest. But as he looked at her now, it was impossi- ble for him to speak a word of warning. It would be an impertinence. Why should he warn her ? Was not the forest her cathedral, to sing matins in, as the birds were singing tlicm ? Nevertheless, from idly toying with his paddle in the water, he suddenly shot out into the middle of the stream, as the sound of voices reached him round a bend in the alder- thicket. When rran9oise turned her head, it seemed to her there was a flash of color that dazzled her eyes. A loaded bateau sweeping down the stream ; a glow of scarlet draperies, as here and there a shawl trailed almost in the water ; a flutter ol blue-gauze veils and ribbons ; a startled exclama- tion : ** Frank!" There was Ars^ne staring across at her, out of the bateau; for once surprised into taking the initiative, as Marie sat in the bow, struck speech- less by the sight. But Marie could not be struck speechless for long. *'It is my little sister," she said, rapidly, to .rr 7 128 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. her neighbors in the boat. ^'Idid not suppose slio could bo with us yet. To-morrow she was promised to us ; not to-day. You did not know ? But that seems strange ! I thought every one knew. What a good child, Frank, to come and join our party ! " she cried, putting out her hand to the girl, as the boat pushed in among the bushes on the margin where she stood. Frank ! Dallas in his canoe sat staring at her as if the sun-dazzle blinded his eyei'. Marie, glancing round her with a helpless air, started slightly, as if she saw him for the first time. **Mr. Fraser ! so hero you are! I suppose this wild little singing-bird of onrs drew you here as she drew us ? I was going to say we were in a difficulty ; but now that you are hero, I may hope that we are out of it. The truth is, our bateau is too full — " **But my canoe is at your service," cried the young man, eagerly. ** Mr. Fraser, this is my sister Frank, of whom you have heard us speak. And, Frank, Mr. Fra- ser is our cousin, more or less removed — " "*Who drags at each remove a lengthening chain,' " said Dallas, as he jDUshed his canoe along- side. "That is the worst of these cousinships. The best of them is, we have a better claim than A UTILE MAID OF ACADIE. 129 the outside world to be called on to do cousinly offices." "Then you will take Frank on board, Mr. Fraser ? And let me come, too ; the bateau is rather crowded, and your canoe holds three, I think?" She made the exchange lightly and swiftly ; but Frank was holding back. **I3ut, Marie, tante Marguite ? She will make me a heau sabbat, if I stay away, and she does not know." "And mamma? Yes, I understand your scruples," Marie returned, giving the girl a warn- ing glance not to be too expansive. " One of the guides, however, is going back to the village from our camp, and we'll send word to mother and nurse how we have carried you off. Come, child." The pretty, imperious air of elder-sisterly au- thority set very gracefully on the beautiful young woman, who from amidships in the canoe was holding out her hands toward Frangoise. But it was Dallas who helped her in, saying as he did so, under his breath : "And Mis is Frank!" " My 7ieom is Marie Fran9oise," the girl an- swered, demurely. But there was dimpling sunshine in her face ; sunshine and brightness everywhere, as the stream 9 130 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. swept merrily on, and beyond Ihc Fourche tlie camping-ground came into view. To Fran9oiso it was laughable enough, the eagerness with which the men were all gathered into a knot on the beach at the water's edge : one tall, brown-bearded fisherman leaning on his rod with one hand, while in the other he held up to view the trophy of that rod — a gleaming salmon, a twcnty-fivc-pounder ; at sight of which the sportsman next him let his dwarfed trout trail ignominiously on the ground as he stood. Fran- 9oise brightened and nodded as she caught sight of a familiar figure behind him. **That is old Mande Pig- Eyes," she explained to Fraser. " lie is from down Tobique-way ; he's one of the very best of the guides, Pacifique says.", But how they are all got up to play at work ! all, indeed, but that veritable sportsman, Mando Pig-Eyes. Pacifique was wont to grumble at the trouble when now and again he would de- scend below the falls, and up one or other of the tributary streams, in search of salmon, trout, or pointic noir ; and here were these men making game of toil, and turning their backs upon civili- zation — for a iark, as Dallas Fraser would sav. And the fine ladies too ; some of them filling with color the doorway of the big tent on the bank above ; two or three of them just stepping from the bateau beached a moment later than the canoe. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 131 M "You must come and speak to ^frs. Osborne, Frank," Mario said, at once. ** It is she who is matronizing us : yonder hero of the hv^ fiah — salmon is it, you say ? — is her husband. — Ali, thanks, Mr. Frasor ; now we arc both out dry- shod, we'll run up the bank, and leave you the canoe. " Marie, as she drew her little sister's arm within hers, was wondering why she had not before so clearly seen how charming the young creature was. She was in her own place out here in the woods : blooming and free and natural, where others, some of them, were looking and feeling rather artificial. Marie was quite taken by sur- prise ; no longer shy, and as unconscious as a child, Frank went flitting here, there, everywhere, helping in the camping preparations ; even stop- ping to hold the tent-cord for Mando Pig- Eyes, while on the sly he makes the sign of the cross over the knot, that it may hold. 132 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. X. " Yes, I will eay what mere friends say — Or only a thought stronger ; I will hold your hand but as long as all may — Or so very little longer." " Mademoiselle ! What are you doing here ? " She was on her knees in the bateau, her arms crossed on the gunwale. She threw a laughing glance over her shoulder upon Dallas Eraser as he spoke to her. " Doing Y Repeating the paternoster of Saint Do-nothing : that is what tante Marguite says I am usually about. You may come and help mo, if you will : the saint has many followers in this camp." He came down to her, where the boat was drawn up on the stony beach ; and as he stood beside her^ he could see what had brought her there. The trees bordering the stream stood aside to give the water room, and so left a clear view of the northern sky. It was all glorious with northern lights — fold on translucent fold of green and white and crim- son flapping and veering about, as if blown to and fro in a strong wind. t A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 133 " One can almost hear the rustle, as the cur- tains sweep aside. It seems as if tlioy must open straight up into heaven ! " said the girl's low voice. Dallas had seated himself on the gunwale, not far from where she leaned : it must be confessed his eyes were oftener on the dainty profile turned to him, than on any thing heaven-like. "May be heaven is not so far off, after all ?" 8he ventured presently, in the same low, half- Rwed tone. " Bonhomme Pacifique says there are birds that can find the way to the upper sea beyond the clouds — the Sea of Glass, in paradise, you know. I wonder if they could carry a mes- sage there ? Only, it is an answer we would want. And that, perhaps, would not be what we would be glad to hear." He could not follow her thought, as Kendal might ; nor divine that she was fancying the grandmere's look c?^ Jiant en has, if she should hear of Madame Jej.n in the De Landremont homestead, and little Tran^uaise out here with a gay party irorn Uiere. " 3Iais 02ii, 1 am going in. It is quiie late, I am afraid — " th') girl broke the silen*.^ oy way of closing her ear to the scornful little laugh she could fancy floating down to her through those swaying curtain-folds. For grandmamma wou]d be much the same up thjre, 6U])pose 1 " The ^n 134 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. lights up yonder arc deceiving : one can not tell, sometimes, if sunset is fading, or the aurora begin- ning, when the whole sky is colored like this. And Marie will be looking for me back to supper. I hope monsieur is hungry?" she said, with a friendly nod. " For I've wheedled old Mando Pig-Eyes into letting me make the bread, in- stead of his endless great thick buckwheat-cakes. And let mo tell monsieur, though I say it that shouldn't, my bread is well good, if it hasn't been kneaded by an angel, like the baker's of Saint Matthieu." There was something too **fey" to be angelic in the laughing, upturned face ; nor, evi- dently, was she looking for the hackneyed com- pliment which Dallas knew better than to pay her. Instead, he was avowing himself ready even for Maude's buckwheats smothered in maple- sirup ; how much more for mademoiselle's handi- work ! **For the buckwheat-cakes have grown slightly monotonous ; even that wonderful dish of the nursery jingle would, if set before the king too often, don't you know ? " Fran^oise did know — Mother Goose having been instrumental in her early English educa- tion. But she was vehement in defense of the buckwheat, which the first Acadians had brought with them from Bretagiie. Yet monsieur, look A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 135 you, must not suppose there is nothing else that will flourish here : this very autumn, tchi voine, bonhomme Pacifique expects to gather in, besides potatoes, four or five hundred bushels of nevaux — *^ et p'is il tchuillcra du hUdad, de Vaouen — " Fran5oise had dropped into French, in her eagerness, as a certain personage known to fame dropped into poetry ; but she stopped suddenly, seeing the blank of her companion's face. *^Ah, bah!" she said, with a shrug; *' mon- sieur is like Mario, he can understand no French but of the books. Monsieur will not get that, among nous autres acadiens. Unless sometimes from the old books, indeed : we broke off with tlie Grand Monarque." It was rather a matter-of-fact conversation, to be carried on under the stars and the palpitating northern lights ; but grain, and turnips even, may borrow interest from a pair of red lips and two bright eyes. Dallas Fraser was impatient enough of the interruption, when he saw Marie come sauntering down toward them, by the path the turf began to show for these few days of camping here. Franjoisc did not see — her back was toward the path. " Let ui? go and superintend our chef Mandu," Dallas proposed, quickly. "It will never do to have that bread spoiled in the baking. Come ; ■IHWW*« 136 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. you owe it to me not to balk me of the promised feast." He strolled off leisurely with her, crossing the open space in a direction not to face Marie. " Mrs. Grundy," he was calling her to himself, honestly forgetting that it was half for the sake of her bright eyes that he had found the Dallas kinship so easy to trace on shipboard, and the De Landre- mont house quite in the road of his Canadian tOu , JV"^' * stood looking after them with a faint smile, j t"^'gnizing his sudden shortness of vision. There was no bitterness in the smile, only a little bland cynicism. So Miss Innocence was quite capable of her own bit of flirtation ? — and could be trusted, unassisted, to forget her monsieur le docteur who reminded her so much of "Uncle Frank ! " "We are all alike, we women," Marie was saying to herself, half scornful, half complacent. " And a good thing, too — for the women. But not for the John Kendals, when once in a while a John Kendal occurs. Ah, bah ! what does it matter ? — the John Kendals have the best of life, after all ; they carve out their own way, and, whether they succeed or fail, they have lived. While we women — oh, we women think we take our fate in our own hands ! And if we do, once A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 137 in a way, wo can't keep hold of it ; we're afraid or ashamed to keep hold of it, and so we let it drop ont of our slack grasp." She let her hands fall slowly apart before her, with a gesture of surrender. And then she laughed a little, mockingl}'. **Let it drop? Ah, but he will think they grasp at his fast enough, now that his are no longer empty and poor. But must he think so ? I am no fool, to play my part so ill as that. If I can not manage better than that, I might as well still be silly little Mary Smith, as she was before these dozen years were her schoolmasters to train her into Marie de Landremont. And even silly little Mary Smith was not so silly as that. No, no ; it shall go well." The blood had come back to her checks, the sparkle to her eyes, as she strolled on into the light from a great fire of logs piled in the midst of the encampment. It threw a ruddy glow far round, beyond which the woodland belt loomed the darker from the contrast, now that the au- rora was beginning to flicker out. But in the center, where the brightness was concentrated, a small figure went flitting to and fro, about the wide-mouthed oven. The red-hot coals from the huge fire had been heaped inside it, and then raked out again, and the bread — Frank's bread — put in to bake. And 138 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. now it was drawn out, a very triumph of light- ness and whiteness and brown-crustiness. The first bit must be broken off for Dallas, He took it quite gravely, and began to muncli like a hungry schoolboy, declaring that never was there bread like this before. Frank stood and watched him with an air of satisfaction, her hands folded placidly before her. "t/c sus hen benaise," she said, complacently. *^It might have been baked pas Uong assiz, you know ; or overbaked — " " Hard as a stone ? Yes, I know. "Will you always be so good to me, mademoiselle ? When T asV you for bread, will you never give me a scone ? " XL ** Strawberry leaves and May -dew In brisk morning air, Strawberry-leaves and May-dew Make maidens fair." "CoMMENT-OE vous portcz 'hord'hui ?" cried the girl, standing still with a courtesy, and a laugh in her blue eyes. It was far up the bend of the stream. Dallas Eraser, paddling along its course, and expecting A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 139 to bring back a string of breakfast trout, had looked for nothing better lying in wait for him. And so the girl was a surprise. Kot that she had been lying in wait for him ; she was as much taken by surprise as he. ** It is the last morning," she said, half apolo- getically. "And it is a shame to lose so much of the bright day as they do, Marie and the rest. I stole out for a long ramble. I shall be back be- fore they are half ready for breakfast." *' Not sleepless, eh, mademoiselle, and tired of the rude camp-life ?" *'Mo, I always sleep like a sabot. And tired of camp-life in a week ? Yes, when the week of three Thursdays is come. Softly, monsieur, you will have the canoe aground." " Can't be helped," he asserted, running it into the bit of bank where she was standing. " There is a mysterious magnetic current hereabout ; my compass is all astray ; no use in trying to steer away. No, you don't understand, not being nau- tical. But it's very easily explained. Not while you stand aloof there ; you must come into the canoe. No, you will never get that dead trail of bramble disentangled from your dress without my help. And that's a perfectly impervious thicket just beyond you. You will have to go back the way you came, unless you take to the canoe." She let him hand her in : how could she help ■--. .-rt ■■■' 140 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. it, with the sun slanting over the freshening water running in bkie and gold and airy lines of foam where the breeze strikes it ; and the green woods crowding down to the very brink, where they can not stop themselves before a branch trails here and there upon the swaying current ? And there is the praiseworthy sense of being up and doing, while the tents behind are plunged in drowsiness. Nothing could be more meritori- ous in the eyes of the whole camp, than this lay- ing up of silver treasure against their wakening. At one time, Dallas was catching the trout as fast as he could drop his flies upon the water. Yet the treasure did not seem to accumulate so very rapidly. Dallas was puzzled — until, turn- ing suddenly, he caught Frangoise in the act of leaning softly over the water, letting a young quarter-of-a-pounder flash, with a lively flick of his tail through her slim fingers, back into his element. " Frank ! " In his angry astonishment, he does not know how he has called her. " Ah, par exemple ! " she says, looking straight at him with a defiant shrug, her eyes flashing, her color rising. She is taking it so seriously, that Dallas laughs outright. *'Are you furthering sport? Have your k'- A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 141 boasted trout-streams so few fish, that you arc providing mc with the same to take over and over again ? That may be fun to you, but I doubt it is to the trout." She shrugs lier shoulder again. "Best leave the trout and me to arrange that. All you have to do is to catch them. You bade me take care of them. I am doing it, you see. You know our saying, ' Where every one minds one's aifairs, the cows are well kept.' " *'And where is that? In this lucky coun- try ? " " But no ! '' She shakes her head at him gay- ly. " In the pays de sapience : that must be Nor- mandy, you know, where I get my yellow head. Though after all I am less normande than bre- tonne." " And American, too ? At least, I have heard your sister speak as if she were at home in the States." "Marie is different." She did not explain how, but went on presently : "Mamma was born in the States, in St. Louis, where Marie went to school. But then, all mam- ma's people were Acadian, carried by the Eng- lish ships down into les Louisianes, at the time of the dispersal, when all Evangeline's people were scattered to the winds along the coast. The Thibodeaux — (I've heard a parish down there still I- ;;} ' 142 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. bears that name) — some of them went higher up the great river, to the new settlement at St. Louis, to which, then, les Louisianes stretched up. Oh, grandmamma has told me all about it. She wished to show me how I must be all acadienne, after all. And the Thibodeaux never altogether lost sight of their kindred here. "When mamma was quite a young girl, she came and spent a summer on the St. John ; most of it with grandmamma. It was very gay that summer in the old house ; it must have been like this." Dallas Fraser checked a smile. lie had found it dull enough there at the house. "But then there was the Thibodeaux-de-Landremont romance going on," he said, tentatively. That was true enough ; but so much of it as Frank knew she was silent upon : otherwise, she was chattering away freely enough. Dallas dis- covered that she believed in the reality of the poet's Evangeline, and was ready to show him at home, as proof, a prose French version of the poem, which had belonged to grandmamma. "And Evangeline— ;?fl5s si bete, moi! — Evange- line, to run over the universe after a Gabriel who for his part was amusing himself very well with his buying and his selling, and put her in the rank of forgotten sins, to be recalled on his death- bed I Though grandmamma would never have let me say that I " \i A LITTLE iLVID OF ACADIE. 143 Shn ended with a smile and a half sigh, re- membering how little grandmamma had ever let her say. But that she did not add ; though it did not occur to her how freely already she was talking to this stranger. It did not occur to her that he was a stranger ; with such responsive good-fellowship was he list- ening, and looking at her in his eager way, as he let the canoe drift with the stream. It is so easy to drift, without a thought of the way back ; without a thought of whither one is being borne on in the sunshine, when the trees and blossoming shrubs are alike at every bend, and the same ferns and mosses stoop down for the clear brown ripple to wash through them ; and when one is looking into a pair of eyes as blue and bright as the morning. It was just then that the current twisted the canoe round unawares into the branching stream that ran dancing and dimpling mischievously away with these careless voyageurs, into the very heart of the wood. 144 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. XII. '* Song-birds of passage, days of youth." The merry, dimpling, miscliievous ..wioani might do what it would witii them both : neither FrangoisG nor Dallas was heeding the way. When they came to the forks, and the current twisted them round, he was telling her of sailing up the great sea-lochs at home. *an England ?" " What, you take me for a southron, with my Scottish name, forbye my gudc Scots tongue ?" '* Mais oui, I took you for the rich, rich Eng- lish cousin — " Dallas laughed outright ; but the g aw nothing either to laugh at, or to be embarrassed by. She sat trailing her hand in the water, look- ing at him with a puzzled air, until he had ex- plained. " It is not that I «???, but that I Jiad, a rich, rich English cousin. Otherwise I should have had no more gear than the unlucky Master of Ravenswood, without a Caleb Balderstone to keep up the credit of the house. And being only a cousin, and so with no great expectations, I had, don't you know, to make my own way in the world." I' A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE U5 " By way of the sea-loclis ? " she in([uired, mis- chievously. **That was earlier. I dare say the rou;2:hing it helped to train mo in the way I — rather stum- bled into than chose. You see, I chanced to be abroad — " **0h, ye?^, I know, making the Grand Tour," Frank put in, with a wise nod. Slie remembered reading about the Grand Tour in that old-time diary which grandmamma had laid hands on, as she told Kendal. Dallas stared, and then he laughed. *' It was not exactly tlie grand tour ; rather, a tramp abroad. I was doing it on foot, knap- sack on back, and sometimes a forced march and a hungry one, if a lean purse made half-rations : when I chanced to stumble on tlie genuine thing, the knapsack-and-forced-march gentry. It was on the borders of the inexpressible Turk, down by Bosnia and Herzegovina, where all was in the tumult of war. And so I — " Frank's drip])ing hand flashed up out of the water and clasped the other eagerly. ** You became a soldier ! " A soldier, a hero, she might have said ; her eyes spoke for her. Dallas reddened, and threw her a disconcerted glance. ** I became — a newspaper correspondent." 10 146 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. "Oh!" Her face fell. Dallas's, also. He paddled on without speak- ing, staring dully down into the water for one moment of profound discouragement, before he plucked up heart of grace to prove to her that newspaper correspondents can be heroes as well as soldiers. He did not take himself and his own exploits for the text of his proof ; it was clear that he pres- ently forgot himself, in telling of the daring of a certain well-known countryman of his. It was not his fault if the girl, listening eager-eyed, and with the quick blood flickering in her cheeks, saw two bold adventurers where the story-teller named but one. She drew a long, deep breath, when they reached that crest of the Balkans, and saw the battle going on beneath them, in the mountain mists. **01i, and is that being a newspaper corre- spondent ? and I who thought you must be a sol- dier to be a hero ! Eh, you must be as brave — " He colored high. " * I the little hero of each tale ? * But I was not speaking of myself." She nodded at him confidently. *^ As if I did not know ; as if I could not tell ! Et p'ls ? — go on I " impatient of the interrup- tion. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 147 It is not in man, from Othello's day to Dallas Fraser's, to tell a story the more coldly because a Dcsdemona listens : " ' She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them,' " Dallas presently caught himself saying, under his breath. " What is that, Mr. Fraser ? Tell me again. I won't lose anything that happened." He looked at her with a quizzical gleam in his eyes, half laughter, half embarrassment. " But I am not at all sure it happened — the first part of it, I mean." " Is it that you have been telling me some- thing that did not actually happen ? And I list- ening and believing all, trying of all my best to remember the vatz, and niks, and nitzas of those dreadful names ! '* **\Vill you really remember anything about them and me?" he cried. ''May I, indeed, hope you will not forget me altogether ? " " Monsieur took care to prevent that, the first time we met," she said, dryly. She caught hold of the chain about her throat, and drew out a round and shining something which had been hidden under her kerchief's folds. 1 ■Ji^" 148 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. " Monsieur remembers this ?" He stared at the coin ; then, with a rush of blood to his face, put out his hand confusedly. " Give it me. How shall I ever explain ? What a fool, what a fool I was ! and that you should keep the remembrance of my folly hke that ! No, you must give it back." For she was slowly settling it ai^ain into its hiding-place under tlie white mus. . folds. She shook her head at him, laughing. " Folly ? But why should it have been folly ? Unless, indeed, a sixpence might have done ? " "Frank!" The hurt tone checked her at once. She just touched his sleeve lightly, with a friendly nod. " But I won't have a sixpence instead of it. I won't have anything but just this that you have given me. I mean to keep it, and wear it, since it has the most convenient hole to hold my bit of chain." After all, need he feel unalloyed annoyance that she wore his gift ? It was half doubtfully that he said again : "I wish you would let me have it back." But he seemed to have lost her attention. She was glancing about her ; the sun looked higher than it should be, as it filtered through the branches overhead. "We certainly have come too far. I am A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. Ud afraid your trout will hardly be for breakfast. We must turn." What can be easier ? The stream was run- ning merrily, hurrying them along. When, on a sudden, the girl turned on Dallas with a sharp ring in her voice : " The alders ! We never came this way." There they are, the alders : no longer a rolled edge along the border of the river ; but a choking brake, laying branches low upon the glossy sur- face, leaning together across it. Back the canoe went, to avoid them ; up and down another silvery loop : presently entangled in just such another network. But there was the tinkle of clear water ahead : the day had grown so still, it could be heard. "The river is calling to us," Dallas said, cheerily. "We'll try if this branch is a guide to it." #;' Not a very willing guide, apparently ; thrust- ing obstacles of overlapping boughs in the way, until the two voyagers had to lean low in the ca- noe, abandon pole and paddle, and grope through the green smother by catching at the boughs overhead, and so pulling themselves along. When with the last pull they shot out into the widened stream rushing clear and free over its rocky bed, the sense of relief was so great that it left them leisure to discover it was long past '■i '' 150 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. breakfast-time, and nothing could be better than a trout broiled on the pebbly beach. Frangoise must heap a platter of green leaves with fragrant red wild berries on the border of the wood. "Now, if we had that plump wild pigeon — " But Fran9oise put herself between Dallas and the canoe, in the bottom of which lay his gun. " It is not loaded ? I am glad. I won't have the birds shot. If we only had some tea, now, to keep it from being a dry repas de hrehis ! " There was the river- water, amber-clear, and sparkling over the pebbles in a rift of sunshine. Elsewhere the trees put their heads together to shut the two in, as if to make a happy secret of the hour that went by so fast. But, also, they shut out the sky ; there was no hint of how the day was changing, until a mut- ter of thunder told it. Franjoise paled a little at the sound. " (7« m^apeurit ! ^* she said, startled into forgetting her English — *' (Ja m^apeurit! " " The thunder ? The only danger is of a wetting. That is bad enough for you. And see, here comes the first sharp patter on the leaves overhead. It is well that they are so thick. But we must find better shelter than this." Happily it was not far to seek, when they pushed into the brushwood — a great, hollow It A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 151 cedar, aged as if it might have been one of those into which the Indian wizard Glooscap metamor- phosed the two brothers who came begging from him length of days and strength and stature, all for themselves, and not to serve their fellow-men. This cedar served Fran9oise with a sort of sen- try-box refuge now, as Dallas told her. He stood leaning against the trunk, speaking to her en- couragingly from time to time, when there was a lull in the fury of the storm. '* This is pretty well in its way. But if you had ever seen what it can do, in this line, in India—" Crash ! went the bushes, a stone's-throw away. Frank clasped her hands and leaned forward : was it a tree flung down so close to this ? Dallas turned, and stared straight into a pair of black, fiery eyes. Stared straight into them, before he took in the shaggy black body hurling its cumbrous length over a fallen trunk — tearing through the vines, crashing down the oianches ; his snarling lip curled up over the sharp white teeth, his hoarse bear's growl thrilling the hush. There is not a moment Dallas reaches out mechanically for his shot-gun leaning against the tree, unloaded as it is. Not a moment ; but, when he turns again to fling himself forward between the brute and I ■ill i; k M I 1 1 I PH 'ItoV 152 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. Franyoiso in her hiding-place, she stands before liim. '* Frank!" A thunder-crash, that deadens his hoarse cr}' ; a lightning-glare, tearing the very heavens in two, and kindling all the glooming forest with a lurid glow, against which trunk and twig stand out in black, and the great black brute — The great black brute is cowering for fear ; like a whipped hound, is slinking away through the underbrush : as though that grand outburst of wrathful Nature were planned for his own indi- vidual confusion. And Francjoise and Dallas stood clasping hands, as if that outburst were for their own in- dividual salvation. Without a word. But what need could there be of words between them anv more ? Dallas seemed to think that there was none, for present- ly he had her in his arms. When, glowing with confusion, she made a movement to withdraw herself, he released her at once. " Sweetheart, I can let you go, because I have you fast ! You would have given your life for mine ? But don't you know, then, Frank, that yours is mine ? " "I — it was only — it was all my fault — " she stammered, blushing painfully. "For I A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 153 would not let you load your gun this morn- 5> ing, He pulled out his powder-flask now, and pro- ceeded to load. " Not that we will need it again ; the very heavens — thank God — " he lifted his hat rever- ently — '* fought for us. Master Bruin will never venture to show his snarling black muzzle in this spot again." He laughed a little unsteadily. '^It'sacase of ' after death the doctor/ with these leaden pills of mine." The doctor I Frangoise's lips whitened again. She stole a swift, guilty glance at this new lover of hers, standing bareheaded in the rain, a glow of tri- umph about him, a look of success, and confidence in fortune, and will to have his own way. "I have you fast." But he did not repeat it ; and if, in the hours that followed, he told her he loved her, it was only by a glance, or a thrill in some commonplace word. These, while they spoke plainly enough, need not frighten the poor little fluttered girl with press- ing for an answer. The storm soon raved itself out ; the sun, shin- ing toward its setting, beamed cheerfully upon the twisting streams that rushed on from their suddenly overflowing springs. The pebbled sand- n 154 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. bars, tho wide beaches, were all hidden now ; Frangoise and Dallas might float over them, with- out a recognition of the shallows which this morn- ing had threatened the canoe with grounding. When the forest-ways are water-ways, a deluge like this is sure to confuse them. Here and there the foliage made a dense roof overhead, shutting out the sun that might have given them some guidance as to the direction of the camp. But then, as Frank pointed out, his guidance was superfluous while the trees by the way gave them so many hints — the thickest moss upon the north side of the trunks, the heaviest spruce-boughs always on the south. They were hints which could not always be fol- lowed, however : the course of the streams often forbidding. For the canoe was not to be aban- doned, even when now and again the hoarse brawl- ing of a rapid threatened to stop the way. Then Dallas found the girl fearless and cool, and ready to do her part in steering, paddling quietly in the stern, while in the bow the skilled canoer was free to watch the current, his paddle grasped in his two hands, the blade straight under water, turned rudder-like now this way and now that. The water curling alongside, the handful of diamond- spray flung glittering into the sunshine, the gid- dy descent, and triumph of the floating into a smooth stretch beyond : the girl was glowing and A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 155 sparkling with it all, and quite forgetting every- thing except the present moment. " We shall come upon the camp itself present- ly, without knowing it," Dallas declared, gayly, determined not to betray his anxiety at the situa- tion. *^ It would be too bad to take them una- wares, in the midst of discussing us and our escapade ; les abscns ont toujours tort, you know. So I am going to fire a blank cartridge now and then, as our herald." Would it be answered ? It was a forlorn hope ; and half a dozen times it failed. But on tlie seventh, there was a faint, far-away reverberation ; it might have been an echo, but an Irish one, that gave a cheery answer. When it was repeated again and yet again, the canoe was turned and headed for the sound ; al- though the sun pointed out the fact that it was straight away from the direction in which the camp ought to lie. *. fi' % '% t '"ih. ■^^ .^"h,^ M m^ 156 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. % XIII. " H61as, je sals un cbant d'ltmour' Triste ou gai tour h toui*— Ce chant, qui dc mon coeur s'elbve, D'oii vient qu'cn plcunint jo I'acheve ? " Yonder, on the green bank, it is not the usual cozy cottage of the pioneer habitant, that stands with gayly paneled doors and sloping whitewashed roofs ; but the log-cabin of a lum- ber-camp, with wooden table nailed to the floor, and bunk-like beds against the wall. In one of these, on a mattress of springy spruce-boughs, was lying a lumberman with a leg fractured by the falling of a tree ; waiting, in what patience he might, for the doctor who had been sent for. His more patient wife was with him, and there was nothing for any one else to do. So Franyoise wandered out-of-doors ; smiling a little, tremu- lously, to herself, as she reflected that, in Dr. Kendal's absence, the doctor must be the one down Tobique-way, who, according to bonhomme Pacifique, sends his patients so promptly on tho short-cut into the other world. Far more desirable than the inside of the cabin, was the outside, with the softest of evening winds ?^'' A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 157 blowing, and tlie moon throwing its faint white light into the very midst of the sunset still glim- mering on the lake. It is a bit of winding water that well deserves its flowing Indian name, as it bends and turns be- tween the gaps of ferny hills stripped bare of tim- ber by the lumbermen. Just here, a ledge of broken rock runs out into the water, offering Fran9oise an elbow-chair, with the gleaming rip- ple twinkling at her feet. She thought she was well hidden there ; until at the sound of her own name she turned — to find Dallas leaning with arms folded on the high back of her chair. " I have been looking for you every — " He broke off ; surely there were tears in the eyes slowly averted from him ? "Frank, you are not frightened? — you are not unhappy ? This is a safe bield until they come for us : which they may any hour, now that a messenger is gone to the camp. And that is a canny gudewife in yonder, who will have you in charge until your friends are here." She answered nothing. Perhaps she was try- ing to steady her voice. It did not help her, that he swung himself over the ledge and stood beside her. " Sweetheart, look up ! Why do you turn from me ? Are you angry with me for what I said to you awhile ago ? " III ill mm 158 '"•if- - "v A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. She did look up now, not understanding. '* Awhile ago ?" lie laughed rather unsteadily. "Do we keep up the French fashions here in the forest ? Ought I to wait for some one to speak for me ? Can I not say, in the straight- forward Saxon way : Frank, I love you ; be my wife I " The words might seem confident ; the voice was not, the eyes were not, though ho had taken her hands masterfully in his. She hardly heard him. She was not, indeed, tliinking of him. She had come out here to fight her battle by herself : that battle which her mother had given up in a cowardly fashion Fran^oise had so scorned. Her lip curled now ; but it was in scorn of herself, not of her mother. " * Blood can not lie,' grandmamma always said — " She turned to Dallas in a passion of haste, snatching her hands away. *^ I am not going back to the camp. I am go- ing home to my mother. My mother I She can understand, she can forgive." ** Frank — Frank, my darling — " She had started to her feet ; her f ice ^ white, her whole frame was in a qn'^*^ "No- -not that, not that ! It not matte to you long. For what am I but u poo- little. J A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 159 ignorant girl, unfit — But I will go back to my mother. /SAc will understand." She moved away sharply, as if to seek her mother that same moment. She pushed past Dallas, and round beyond the elbow of that ledge of rock. In her hurry to escape — not from Dallas only, but from herself, ready enough to play the traitor and yield to him — it did not work a^ifainst her, that beyond that ledge they were no longer alone. Three men were coming down the hill that bris- tled with the ghosts of dead trees, some of them girdled and white as birch-stems, others charred and blackened by old forest-fires. Foremost was the guide, who stepped out briskly ahead : a grotesque figure, with head and shoulders thrust forward out of the canoe slung on his back for the portage. Behind him tramped the other two men, silently, though side by side. Frank — picking her way over the stones, with Dallas Fraser following somewhat sulkily behind her, his hands in his pockets, not offering to help her as she turned her back on him — Frank glanced at the two, and saw they were not lumbermen. The nearest one was a stranger to her ; the other, with the wallet across his shoulder, was probably the doctor from down Tobique-way ? But surely this man was taller, broader — IGO A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. " Dr. Kendal ! "' she cried out suddenly. He looked as if he could not trust his eyes. Yet, after all, there was no one like Fran- yoise. He stood still, and sent the guide on, with a hasty — "Tell Laforest I will be with him presently." Then he turned to the girl. She put out both her hands to him ; laughing with the sound of tears in her voice, and a strange, unmirthful look on her white face. There was light enough yet in the sky shining down on them to show him that. *'What has liappened?" he asked her ea- gerly. But for a shade of anxiety for the look on her face, his own was beaming, oager ; in his eyes a gladness, almost a triumph, new to her. He glanced at Dallas Fraser ; it was easy to see ho found him in the way, though he tried not to show it, as Fran9oise meiitioned Mr. Frascr's name, and hurriedly sketched the day's advent- ures. The stranger stood by listening, and looking at the girl somewhat intently while she was speaking. When Kendal would have drawn him into the conversation, he stopped him with a warning hand upon his shoulder. But when she had finished, tho stranger him- A LITTLE MA!I) OF ACADIE. IGl self came a step nearer, and held out his hand to Eraser with bluff heartiness. "No doubt my little maid has been properly grateful to Mr. Eraser ; but she must let me add my thanks for losing the way, and so bringing Frank to meet mo here." *^ Frank ?" — She was staring at him, her eyes rounded, her lips parted. With a glad cry she sprang into his arms, held out for her. "Uncle Frank! Can it possibly be Uncle Frank ?" " Can it possibly be any one else for my little maid ? Or how many knights-errant has she roaming through the woods in search of her ? " She was sure of Uncle Frank now, when he mocked at her gayly, as in the old days ; and she locked her hands over his arm, while the four moved on in the direction of the cottage. After all, the years had wrought less change in carrying the man from the edge of the forties into the fifties, than they had with the girl. They had blurred the likeness between the two Franks, which now was little more than a blond- ness brought down from a common Norman in- heritance. Fran9oise's childish remembrance of him began to come back vividly, as they saun- tered on together. Kendal and Dallas were not sauntering; so 11 162 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. that these two behind were presently tcte-a-tete. As soon as De Landrcmont perceived this, he grew graver. " Little maid, why should I wait for a more convenient opportunity to disabuse you of an im- pression which my friend Kendal tells me has been rankling in your small breast almost ever since you and I parted ? It is old Marguite who lias put it there. The mother and I are good friends enough, little maid — not at all the ene- mies Marguite would make us out." " You are so good, Uncle Frank ! " " And the mother so — ? No, no, that won't quite do. Marguite, I see, has been representing me as a suffering victim. But let me tell you, child, I've been my own worst enemy ; and in taking Jean, instead of me, little Anne — " ^' Broke her word and your heart," Fran5oise said impetuously, hanging her head as if the shame of the confession were her own. *' Neitlier the one nor the other : 'Men have died and worms have eaten them — ' you know enough English to fill out the rest of that truism ? Little Anne's word to me was broken long before, when her people overruled her with a high hand, and married her off to Smith's money-bags. Aft- erward, when my mother fancied the rich young widow would make even a better match for me than the little Thibodeau would have been, and A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 163 h'tele. 3 grew , more an im- ne lias st ever ,te who •e good le ene- t w^on't 3sentiug ell you, and in ;an5oise if the en have »u know truism ? before, rh hand, rs. Aft- |h young for me jen. and brought her to revisit us, it was not to be sup- posed that the old pledge would hold, liowevcr it might in my motlier's imagination and ]\Iar- guite's. This time she met Jean, who before had been away at college ; for you know he was younger than L And just as I flattered myself I was winning her — I was disappointed at the time," he broke off. " Furiously disappointed at the time, Frank, I own it to you ; I flung away from home in an angry outburst my mother never forgot. But disappointed is the word, not broken-hearted. And Anne was right : Jean's love was better worth her having than such a thing as mine. A paltry thing, that could not even keep me from going wrong, with the mem- ory of a sweet woman like that." He had been speaking in a superficial, almost careless way, which seemed in keeping with the whole man. Now, as if something deeper stirred for a breathing-space the shallow nature, his voice fell so that the girl pressed his arm. " I am sure you did not go far wrong. Uncle Frank." He started a little, and brought his absent gaze back from the wooded horizon to the small, fair head almost nestling against him. " Farther than I would have you know of, child. But you must understand, once for all (for I've come many a mile now that you should under- t ^ 1G4 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. stand it), that it was never little Anne's short- coming that drove me there. And, on the other hand, it was not my fault," he added, " that my mother quarreled with Jean. I was off before that. There must have been some coureur dcs hois away back in those early Acadian days ; some wildness of the blood that flowed in through the La Tour veins to us De Landremonts. For I was never quite content until I had broken bonds, away out of hearing of a sound from home. The gold-fever was then at its height, and rumors of the California wonders had reached even here. It was not the gold, but the novelty of it all, that intoxicated me. I went out there ; but had drifted half-Wiiy East at the time the war between tlic States broke out — " *' Oh, I remember, Uncle Frank ! Just after It was all over, you came to us at Liverpool : small as I was, I can recollect your battle-stories and adventures. I used to wonder why you didn't still wear a sword, and pistols in your boots, as you told us the — what did you call them ? — bush- whackers I — did. Oh, you see I have forgotten nothing ! " " Remembering so much, little maid, you ought to remember more : that the mother and I met as sister and brother then, and not as ene- mies. It was because we did so meet, that my mother refused to receive me at home afterward. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIB. 1G5 She had quarreled with Jean and liis wife on my account : she could not forgive me for deserting my own standard ; and that I should have cared to fight in a war between the States — should act- ually have entered the army in Missouri, Anno Thibodeau's old home — it was altogetlier an of- fense so great, that nothing would atone, but my turning my back on what she called the Madame Jean faction." " Poor grandmamma !" the girl said, softly. De Landremont stopped, and looked at her. " Eh ? Well, perhaps you are right. But I had forgotten to be sorry for her. I had been away so long, it only needed that bitter letter of hers, received at Liverpool, to drive me out a wanderer again. And whether I should ever have come back, if I had not met my old friend Ken- dal the other day in St. Louis — " ** Your — old — friend ? And he heard me speak of Uncle Frank, and never told me that he knew him ! " " He never knew me as De Landremont. When first I went away, in my disgust I left be- hind me everything that bound me to the past. We fought shoulder to shoulder through a long campaign, and he knew nothing earlier in my life than its California episode. From what ho heard from you and others here, he began to sus- 16G A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. pect the identity of Frank Latour with Frank La Tour de Landremont ; and from that moment he set to work to trace me throngh old army friends. The other day — that is, ten days or two weeks ago- -business of his own, in connection with getting back his confiscated estate, took him to St. Louis, where I came to meet him, having heard of liis search for me. He told me some- thing of his story ; and perhaps I guessed at more, my little maid," De Landremont added, smiling down on her significantly. *^ It was then that I learned from him all about this unfortunate mis- conception of yours ; and I thought the shortest way to lay that ugly bogey forever, was just to come back with him." " Uncle Frank, Uncle Frank, if you had come back to grandmamma before it was too late ! " How the child must have loved the grand- mother ! She was so white, and the small hands holding by his arm shook so ! De Landremont was touched by her agitation. *' But it would always have been too late, little maid. My poor dear mother — rest her soul I " he put in piously—" would have nothing by halves. To come back and settle down in the house she had built for me on a strip of the old farm ; to speculate a trifle in lumber ; to dabble a little in I)olitics ; to be returned, perhaps, as French mem. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 107 bor of the provincial Piirliament — such a career, Ileaven save the mark ! — in place of that of cattle-king, silver- king, American citizen, and might-be senator — and who knows what there- after, if Jack of clubs should turn out the right bower ? Eh, little maid, I'm afraid you don't quite understand," ho said, catching her puzzled glance. "But this you will : that even the Ma- dame Jean affair would have been easier for the dear old mother to forgive, than my bright little western American wife and couple of small na- tive Americans that are stubborn facts not to be blinked. You must make acquaintance with them all, one of these days, my little maid of Acadie." Frank did not answer. Iler heart was too full. She seemed to be looking at that lowly grave on the hill-side. If he had come back to see that — to cast himself face downward on the sod, praying, striving that some breath of his loving duty might yet reach his mother in the place of shades ! That, she could have understood : not this breezy, easy-going man of the world, with his mild regrets for what had happened, and his so ready owning to faults, that confession and atone- ment seemed much the same thing in his mind. And for years she had been making a tragedy out of this comedy I ": ■! ^ i 108 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. *'Poor grandmamma!" she said to herself again. She was not listening to De Landremont's next words ; which, indeed, were rather in pur- suance of his own train of thought than for her. Jean's family should have it all — the old home- place, the estate which in Fran5ois de Landre- mont's enlarged vision was the merest bagatelle. Franyoisc, stumbling on at his side, and think- ing over and over, '*Poor grandmamma!" was brought back to the present by the voice of Dallas Fraser, who stood still, a few yards in advance. " That black streak on the lake is a canoe, and that speck farther over yonder is another. Can the messenger I sent have come already upon a party in search of us ? " A few moments, and the foremost of the ca- noes had run up to the bank, and the guide was helping his one passenger ashore. " Marie ! " Franyoise ran forward, glad for an instant to escape from the eyes of the men, who followed more slowly. " Marie ! I did not think yon would come so soon. j> " My dear child ! it has been long enough to me, I can assure you. How much longer it might have been, if we had not, in our wandering search for you, met your messenger — '* A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 109 rran9oiso had drawn her forward. *'Uuclc Frank — Dr. Kendal — this is my sister Marie—" *'John!" It was Marie's voice that cut her sliort. With a flutter of her two white hands out- stretched, Marie had turned to Kendal. ** John, Jolin, have you forgotten me ?" He stood staring at her, like a man half roused in the midst of a dream. She was brilliant, there in tho waning light ; no vision of a dream could be brighter. But what is that to Kendal ? Just so a man might look who sees a ghost. And then she smiled. She was beautiful be- fore ; but now her beauty was bewildering. She came a pace nearer to him. '• Have you never a word of welcome for me, John?" lie drew a long, hard breath, passing his hand heavilv over his eves. He never once glanced Fran9oise's way, though somehow she felt he saw her all the while. He answered slowly : " How is it you are not dead, Mary ? For twelve years you have allowed me to believe you were." She glanced from him to the bystanders, shrugging her shoulders. i^i II 170 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. " Can we not wait to go into all that until wo arc alone ?" she said, lowering her voice. But he answered sternly : ** I have done with secrets. It is late to say it ; but at least I will have none of them now. If you are my wife — " Marie — her face glowing and brilliant v/ith what old Marguite called her ^^ bcaute dujcohUy^^ which made naught of those twelve years, and changed her almost into the girl of barely seven- teen, whom Kendal well remembered— Mariu was turning now from Kendal to where Fran9oisc and Dallas had drawn insensibly together, standing on the outside of this scene ; and De Landremont, not without a certain twinkle of expectancy in his eyes, as at the anticipated hit of a well-known actress in a new role^ was looking curiously over Franyoise's shoulder. "Ah, is that you, monsieur Fran9ois ?" Ma- rie nodded at him gayly. "I always knew some day you woiild reappear. The hour for les rcve- nants, is it not so ? Though I planned my com- ing back from the dead after a more romantic fashion, befitting the old story," she said, her eyes alive with mocking spirits. " Only, you see, John will bring me down to the blunt facts. When I proposed to mamma to come back from Europe for Frank, instead of sending for her, it was because the child's letters were full of a cer- A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 171 tain Dr. John Kendal, of whom I had lost sight, but whom I was sure 1 recognized, though I had not seen him since my school-girl days in St. Louis. I fancied if we met again, it might be as old friends — lovers, perhaps — " The dark look on Kendal's face cut her short. ^^ Only, you see — " she said again, "John will bring me down to the blunt fact that every man has a skeleton in his closet. I present you to John's." She made a sweeping courtesy as she spoke. " He thought it was laid away underground. Perhaps he has told you, Frank, of his foolish marriage with a school-girl, when he was a young medical student in St. Louis, on the eve of mak- ing his way South into the army ? Oh, it was foolish, very. I think, even at such an age, I should have seen that, if it had not been for my romantic Elise (my maid, you know, Frank), who aided and abetted the whole affair. I wrote you what I thought of it, you remember, John, when I lay, as every one believed, ill unto death, a few months later." *' I remember." Kendal's face was stern and set. That death-bed letter was safe never to be forgotten. There were sentences in it which he could have repeated, word for word, even now : "It is well I am dying — wretched girl, trapped into a marriage that can mean nothing but mis- 1 i ;H ? 172 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. cry ! You were older than I : you should have known better. Perhaps you did know, John Kendal. Perhaps, bent as you were on going South, you counted on my fortune when your own should bo confiscated ? And now my guar- dian has lost mine for me — and it is as well I am dying — " " It was a lie, then ! " Kendal said between his set teeth. "Yes." ^larie jmt up a deprecating hand. ''But not mine, John. You remember Elise ? She is still with me ; such a clever soul — But too clcYcr for once," she corrected herself. ''You see, she was romantic, as I said : she pictured to herself the terrible suspense the poor young gen- tleman would have to bear, and the months and months before another letter could get through the lines to him. And so, when the ojiportunity came to send this one, and I was lying between life and death, she added her little postscript, which said this was the last day of her poor young lady's life, and the dear angel's last words were to send monsieur this lock of her beautiful hair." Marie said it with a mocking ring in her voice, which showed she was quoting Elise. "And so I died; and then I went abroad. For one must die, must not one, to go to para- dise ? Mamma and my good step-father, Frank's A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 173 fatlicr (you never lieard mc speak of them, John, for my Smith kindred liad frightened mo with that bogey of a step-father), sent for mo to Kuropo when my fortune was lost ; and of course sucli a prospect wai enough to keep a girl from dying outright." There was an utter silence for a moment. Mario broke it, turning, with one of her charming smiles, to Kendal. " Have I sinned past forgiveness, John ? The doing of it was not mine. As for the undoing — Elise never told me of her postscript until wo were on the other side of the ocean. And then I had lost all trace of you. The first I heard, you had been captured on the battle-field ; imprisoned, I could not tell where. I was vouna: and incx- perienccd ; poor Elise was always at my elbow, begging me not to betray her and have licr Sv-^nt adrift into the world. When at last Frank, writ- ing freely to me, after the old lady's death, often mentioned you, it was I who planned that we should come for the child ourselves, instead of sending for her. I thought I should see for my- self if it were really John ! " She had put her hands together, looking up at him pleadingly. But Kendal's face was set as a flint. "And as a preliminary step," he said — ''it was you, then, who had the jmpers sent me, show- i i 174 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. ing that by a little effort on my part I could re- cover my lost fortune ? I am sorry I could not have guessed the sender. I am sorry my journey has been successful. It was nolhing to you that I should chafe myself near to death in prison — that, escaping to Canada just before the war end- ed, I should spend weary years in poverty and friendlessness. But as soon as the tide of fortune turns — " '•'Mais, monsieur le docteur, mon huomme — " The voice behind him, breaking in on him, was that of Lafo rest's patient wife. "My man is restless, monsieur ; there is no keeping him still since Jean has told him mon- sieur ]q docteur is come." Without a word, Kendal turned on his heel and followed the woman indoors. No one spoke at first ; his swift step echoed in the stillness, on the gravelly slope. Then Marie, rather pale, but with a resolute gleam in her eyes, faced round on the three stand- ing together. "You have a homely saying, Fran5oise, that one may not hope to save the liare and the cab- bages. Yet that is what I am going to do," she said, with a gay little nod of defiance to Dame Fortune, who, with a turn of her wheel, had made the task so much more difficult than Mario had expected. "As we are all en famille — " M^. A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 1 (O witli a covert glance at J3alla3 Eraser — " I may as v/cU say that, now the clioux arc safe, I shall de- vote my attention to the lievre.''^ De Landremont made an impatient move- ment. '' Take care what you are about, ]\larie ! Ken- dal is no dull creature, to be caught in a springe. If you don't know a man when you see one, let me tell you what he is. The bravest comrade a man ever fought side by side with, in the ranks ; the gentlest soul to pain and suffering of others ; the stoutest heart to bear his own — " To Frank, half putting out her hand with a rush of sympathy toward the speaker : then let- ting it fall, in a sudden sense of -iindremont strolled down to the bank, half expectant, and more than half glad of the break in a scjne which was to him ratlier embarrassing, though Marie did not seem to find it so. " Mrs. Osborne is with Ars(^ne ; but )'ou see I did not wait for a chaperon," she went en, mock- ingly, "but hurried on with the guide, when he told me my husband was sent for, to a wounded man here. Perhaps the wounded man will be the better for a nurse as well as a doctor. So I shall stay to see what I can do to help the doctor. — Cousin Dallas, you will take Frank out in the canoe to meet the others, and turn them back with you to the camp. And you can tell them A LITTLE ALVID OF AC A DIE. 177 sec I lock- L he idcd ill be So I )ctor. n the back them better than Frank, what has happened : the hap- py meeting that lias taken place ; odd bit of melo- drama out of real life. Explain it all for me, there's a good brother." She broke off abrui)tly, tlirowing up her hands with a deprecating gesture, as if she had used that word inadvertently. And so, indeed, FranQoise supposed she had. But there was a twinkle in Dallas Frascr's eyes, as if he saw through the pretense. lie re- joined at once : *' Your brother indeed, if Frank will have it so. She has not told me ; though I have asked her, and am still waiting for my answer." He had turned to Frank, holding out his hand. When, flushed and downcast, she made no movement to meet it, he took hers with gentle force, and drew it in his arm. Marie stood and looked at them, a faint smile veiling certain bitter lines about her mouth. Then, ''Bless you, my children ! " she said, gay- ly, waving them a stage-benediction ; and flitted from them into the cottage. For a long moment, Franjoisc never moved, her eyes flxed on the doorway through which her sister had vanished. Then with a shiver her fingers closed unconsciously on Dallas's arm. 12 178 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. " How can we go away, and leave — them — so ? And yet—" She was tliinkingof monsieur Ic docteur. And yet must it not be better she should go ? Dallas decided the question for her. De Landremont was already paddling off to meet Arsene, in the pirogue which had brought Marie. Without further loss of time, Dallas pushed off his canoe into the water, and lifted Frank in. " Your sister is a very clever woman, my dar- ling ; we must leave it to her. One of these days, sweetheart, you will know it never docs to inter- vene between husband and wife." Nevertheless, he was very slow in moving off from shore ; dipping his paddle idly in the water, and lingering there in full view from the cot- tage. Suddenly in the open doorway, with the moon- light shining down on them, and the glow of the heartli-fire making a bright background, Marie and Kendal appeared. She was leaning with one hand on his arm, the other flattering her hand- kerchief in gay farewell. Almost a word had done it. "That child, John — she stood staring after me as if she expected a bit of spider-and-fly busi- ness when I ventured in to you. Can not you manage — (she says you have been so good to A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. 179 her !) — to give her a cheerful send-off, by way of happy omen ? She is just engaged to Dalhis Fraser. " So, without word or ghmce, and with a face as set as death, he followed, and let Marie act her little farce with hira by way of puppet. Would it always be a farce — a tragedy ? or a mere comedy of modern life, in which the tragedy is so well masked that no one need suspect the grim traits underneath ? Out there, before they reach the path of moon- light on the lake, Dallas turns round on Frank. *'It is he who is the hero," he says. *' Head of all crysten knights, and never matched by earthly knight's hands. But, Frank — the truest lover of a sinful man, that over loved woman ! " A sudden dimness gathers in the girl's eyes ; but they do not fall under his own. Dallas shifts his paddle into his left hand, and reaches out his right for Frank's. "They'll bo upon us in another moment — those people yonder — and yet you have not told me if you love me, Frank ? " How fair she looks, with that soft shining on her bright, uncovered head, as a sudden current sweeps them on into the moon's path. Lighted up so, they are in full view from the other canoes. 180 A LITTLE MAID OF ACADIE. Dallas, with an air of disgust, grips his paddle again ; and Franyoise is half glad of the respite for to-night— until she catches sight of his face. Then she leans forward slightly, as she trails her hand in the water : " Have I not, Dallas ? " she says. THE END. #» .ddle spite ice. Tails