“If my father hasn’t decoyed you into the trap, quite against your will.”
St. Jacques raised his brows.
“Did you ever know me to say things for the mere sake of being polite?”
“No,” Nancy said honestly; “I never did.”
“Then where is your hat?”
Nancy laughed. Then she departed to wrestle with her hat pins, while the good doctor rubbed his hands with pleasure over the successful tact with which he had won his uninterrupted afternoon.
A round hour later, they stood on the church steps, looking down upon Sillery Cove. One starlit night, long years before, a young general, indomitable in the presence of mortal disease as in the face of an impregnable foe, had dropped down the river to land at that spot and, scaling the cliff, to fight his way to his victorious death. Now the dropping tide had left a broad beach, and the Cove lay in heavy shadow; but, beyond, the open stream flashed blue in the sunlight. Full to the northward, the windows in the rifle factory caught the light and tossed it back to them, dazzling as the glory which Wolfe, landing in the Cove, was fated to find awaiting him upon those selfsame Plains. Still farther beyond, the rock city lay, a gray mound against the vivid blue of the distant hills, and above its crest, even from afar, Nancy could distinguish the blood-red dot which flutters each day from dawn to dusk above the cannon on the King’s Bastion.
“Do you care to see the inside of the church?” St. Jacques asked her.
“Of course. I may never come here again, and I am growing to love your churches,” Nancy answered, suddenly calling herself back from a dream of the day when the golden lilies floated above the Citadel, and of the night when the fleet of English boats crept noiselessly up the river to face—and win—a forlorn hope of victory. Then abruptly she faced St. Jacques. “Bigot or no Bigot, right or wrong, my sympathies are sometimes with the French,” she said. “Wolfe was a hero; but I can’t help siding with the under dog, even if he is coated with gold and fat with bones.”
St. Jacques smiled at her outburst.