"Nonsense, child. Probably she does not feel quite well enough to write, and your father has overlooked the mail. You know how apt men are to forget."
So Amy tried to pacify Martine, and at last succeeded in getting her to look at things more cheerfully. She had never before seen Martine in low spirits, and she felt quite sure that fatigue, even more than disappointment, had caused the tears.
"I will admit," she said, "that this has been a trying day, beginning with—"
"Beginning with Mr. Knight,"—and now Martine was smiling. "Wasn't he funny, with his 'you Americans,' as if we were some strange species?"
"But in the end don't you think that Mr. Knight did pretty well? I think that he more than redeemed himself by his kindness."
"Well, as he is a friend of Balfour Airton's I suppose that I ought not to criticise him. There, don't shake your head, Amy. Yes, I do think that he was very kind—in the end. But the day has been fearfully long. We ought not to have taken that walk this morning."
When at last Martine went to bed Amy sat beside her until she fell asleep. There was a strange mingling of childishness and womanliness in this little Chicagoan to which Amy could not accustom herself. Her worldly wisdom and grown-up air of womanliness were quite as hard to understand as the extreme childishness in which she sometimes indulged. The more equable Priscilla was much easier to comprehend, and yet Amy was not altogether sure that Priscilla, under stress of circumstances, would be the easier to manage.
the right and the wrong of it
"For my own part," said Martine, "I am just as firmly on the side of the Acadians as ever. They may have been stupid about the oath, and probably they were too easily influenced by Le Loutre, but they had been handed from England to France and from France to England so often that I don't see how they could consider themselves English when really they were French."