"You looked so occupied that I was really afraid to disturb you," said the woman. "Shafton is talking Canadian politics with somebody, and I wonder if you are too busy to find a chair for me."
Brooke got one, and his companion, who was the woman Barbara had alluded to as Mrs. Coulson, sat down, and said nothing for a while as she gazed back across the blue inlet with evident appreciation. This was, in one respect, not astonishing, though so far as Brooke could remember she had never been remarkably fond of scenery, for the new stone city that rose with its towering telegraph poles roof beyond roof up the hillside, gleaming land-locked waterway, and engirdling pines with the white blink of ethereal snow high above them all, made a very fair picture that afternoon.
"This," she said at last, "would really be a beautiful country if everything wasn't quite so crude."
"It is certainly not exactly adapted to landscape-gardening," said Brooke. "A two-thousand foot precipice and a hundred-league forest is a trifle big. Still, I'm not sure its inhabitants would appreciate such praise."
Lucy Coulson laughed. "They are like it in one respect—I don't mean in size—and delightfully touchy on the subject. Now, there was a girl I met not long ago who appeared quite displeased with me when I said that with a little improving one might compare it to Switzerland. I told her I scarcely felt warranted in dragging paradise in, if only because of some of its characteristic customs. I think her name was Devane, or something equally unusual, though it might have been her married sister's. Perhaps it's Canadian."
She fancied a trace of indignation crept into the man's bronzed face, but it vanished swiftly.
"One could scarcely call Miss Heathcote crude," he said.
Lucy Coulson did not inquire whether he was acquainted with the lady in question, but made a mental note of the fact.
"It, of course, depends upon one's standard of comparison," she said. "No doubt she comes up to the one adopted in this country. Still, though the latter is certainly pretty, what is keeping—you—in it now?"
"Then you have heard of my good fortune?"