Justin, in his stubborn honesty, would not discuss the matter with her. She had flirted with his father and broken his heart, thereby promoting him to saintship gained through much suffering, and he strongly suspected that she had also broken her own heart, and that her peculiarities were the result of this perversion of her feminine nature. She should have married and become the contented mother of a family.
Miss Gastonguay, as if comprehending his thoughts, changed the subject of conversation. "Has my brother Louis any children beside this one?"
"A fair-haired German girl with a beautiful Christian character. She was a school-teacher whom my wife's father met in some boarding-house. I gathered from what he told me, that, having learned after marriage what he really was, she faded away and died, first making him promise to carefully educate her child."
"He always had a long head, had Louis. It looks to me as if he deliberately laid a scheme to have you marry his daughter."
"I should most certainly not have done so had she been other than she is."
Justin's face glowed. "I am not a man of easy speech," he said, simply, "but I can speak freely to you, and I know you will be interested in hearing that no opinion you can form of my wife will be too high a one. I wish I could describe to you her gentleness and amiability. Little by little she has undertaken the duties of a wife that I was slow to urge upon her. I wished to keep her a happy girl for a time, but the torture of leaving her father brought on a crisis. She began to ask questions, to examine herself, to study me and my relations to her, and now she has put girlhood far behind her, and is getting a firm grasp of things material and spiritual."
"Religion and love," said Miss Gastonguay, with a sigh, "you have both,--or think you have. You ought to be happy."
"We are," said Justin. Then he was reminded of a duty. He first glanced about the room. Captain Veevers's head was bent over the draught-board. He was beating Aurelia now at every game, for her blue eyes had been wandering distractedly toward the music-room ever since Mr. Huntington had sauntered there.
Derrice was engrossed in a book of old prints, and smiled to herself at quaint gods and goddesses riding on clouds, and surrounded by suites of attendants in mid-air.