“Well, Mr. Carington he went over yesterday afternoon. I guess he took the short cut or he would have met Mr. Lyndsay coming out. Mr. Carington must be a pretty nice man. There’s not many as young would give up Saturday afternoon fishing, even a bit of it, to go and see about a sick brat. Fishermen’s generally right selfish. He left them twenty dollars. But he had the high-up sense to give it to Susie. He’s a well set-up young man; I saw him poling a pirogue across. It takes a lot of judgment in a man’s legs to handle a dugout.”
“But you do it well, I fancy,” said Anne.
“Good,” said Miss Lyndsay, and went out, leaving the others to talk alone.
Then Dorothy said, “What troubles that woman the most you couldn’t think, not if you lived as long as Noah.”
“It’s because there won’t be any tombstone. They’re all buried in the wood back of the cabin. Poor little kittens, just dead drownded in filth. She had better have thought more for them when they were alive.”
“Money is well wasted sometimes. You might think of the box of ointment, Dorothy.”
“It’s a long way between them two wastings.”
“Well, I must go and cook Hiram’s dinner. Good-by.” And she went out and down to her dugout.
“What do you think of her, Anne?” said Mrs. Lyndsay, as the maiden lady came out of her own room.
“I think her most interesting, and altogether a remarkable person.”
“A heart of gold!” said Mrs. Lyndsay. “You cannot imagine, Anne, what that woman was to me last summer.”
“I can,—I think I can now.” Mrs. Lyndsay went back to some household occupation, and Anne, returning to her hammock, lay thoughtfully watching the retreating pirogue and its capable guide, and smiling ever as was her habit.
“That beats Marcus Aurelius. To have lost all her children, to have had sickness,—poverty, and not a wrinkle to record it all. That woman must have the self-contentment of a first-class angel. Ah, me!” And she turned again to the “Life of John, Lord Lawrence,” and was soon smiling over it, for in her heroic lives found glad and ready recognition.
The light Gaspé canoe sped away up stream close to the shores, with Archibald Lyndsay and Rose. They were contentedly quiet for an hour or more, and at last left behind them the island camp and its white tents, and then the last of the clearings and the lower alluvial meadows with their richly feathered elms. As they went on, the hills were more abrupt and closer to the river, or precipitous past the power of the hardiest pines to find more than here and there a foothold.