"But she knows you," Desire persisted. "She said, 'Oh, is Miss Caroline Campion your Aunt? I remember her from my youth up.'"
"Very impertinent," said Miss Campion. Her nephew's eyes began to twinkle.
"Oh, everyone knows Aunt Caroline," he explained. "But then, everyone knows the Queen of England."
Aunt Caroline was mollified. "Of course, in that sense—" She felt able to go on with her roast lamb.
Dr. Rogers, who had listened to this interchange with delight, said now that the young lady had been quite right about her place of residence. She did live in Bainbridge, on Barker Street. He did not know her personally but her older sister was a patient of his. The mother and father were dead. Very nice, quiet people.
Desire was quite young enough to laugh and to point this with "Dead ones usually are."
The school teacher, at another table, heard the laugh and felt a passing sense of injustice. It seemed unfair that anyone so obviously without education could feel free to laugh in that satisfying way. It was plain that young Mrs. Spence scarcely realized her sad deficiency. And it certainly was a little discouraging that the cleverest men almost invariably....
Fort William came and passed and in the sparkling sunshine of another morning the train dashed into the wild Superior country where the wealth lies under the rock instead of above it. To Desire, her first glimpse of the Great Lake was like a glimpse of home. The coolness of the air was grateful after prairie heat but, scarcely had she welcomed back the smell of pine and fir, before it, too, was left behind and they swung swiftly into a softer land—a land of rolling fields and fences and farmhouses; of little towns, with tree-lined roads; of streams less noisy and more disciplined; of fat cows drowsy in the growing heat.
"This," said Aunt Caroline with a breath of proprietary satisfaction, "is Ontario."
Desire, always literal, pointed out that according to the map in the time-table, they had been in Ontario for some considerable time.