XXI.
PAUL came back to Port aux Pins five days before the time of his departure for the South. Cicely was still there. She had refused to go to St. Paul. “The only Paul I care for is the one here. What an i-dea, Eve, that I should choose just this moment for a trip! It looks as though you were trying to keep me away from him.”
“I’m not trying; it’s Paul,” Eve might have answered.
“It must be curious to be such a cold sort of person as you are,” Cicely went on, looking at her. “You have only one feeling that ever gives you any trouble, haven’t you? That’s anger.”
“I am never angry with you,” Eve answered, with the humility which she always showed when Cicely made her cutting little speeches.
Paul had been right. As the time of his departure for Romney drew near, Cicely grew restless. She was seized with fits of wild weeping. At last, when there were only two days left, Paul proposed a drive—anything to change, even if only upon the surface, the current of her thoughts. “We will go to Betsy Lake, and pay a visit to the antiquities.”
The mine at Betsy Lake—the Lac aux Becs-Scies of the early Jesuit explorers—had been abandoned. Recently traces of work there in prehistoric times had been discovered, with primitive tools which excited interest in the minds of antiquarians. The citizens of Port aux Pins were not antiquarians; they said “Mound Builders;” and troubled themselves no more about it.
“We had better spend the night at the butter-woman’s,” Paul suggested. “It is too far for one day.”
Eve did not go with the party. They had started at three o’clock, intending to visit a hill from which there was an extensive view, before going on to the butter-woman’s farm-house. At four she herself went out for a solitary walk.