"To Grand-Pré?"
"Yes."
"Marie," she continued, "you and your father and Suzanne must come with us. We have arranged for everything, and you must come."
Miss Gaston left Marie with a few kind words, and as the tide had fallen, she stepped over the rocks of the ford and joined her friends.
Marie passed up the steep road to Bluff House still oppressed with the grief that had called forth her sympathy with Miss Gaston. From the summit Winslow himself, seated alone, looked down upon the scene presented to his view, and gave himself up for the time to the emotions which his experience of the afternoon left him. He recalled the whole incident, and for the first time he found that the child woman had in some mysterious way been the cause of all his present unhappiness. He recalled what Miss Gaston had said in regard to Marie and himself, and he wondered how it was possible for her to suppose him occupying the position she had assumed for him in the life of the Acadian maiden. He saw Miss Gaston going up the beach towards the mainland, and as her form grew smaller and at last was lost to view in the road which turned along the side of the hill, he looked at Marie coming nearer and nearer as she ascended with slow steps the island road. Her form stood out with bolder lines, and her large eyes and beautiful face had taken a new quality in his eyes. He found himself thinking about her as a woman, not as a child, as he had done previously. The influence of Miss Gaston on him was already at work, and in the confusion of his thoughts he did not fail to realize that from that day the two women who had so much to do with his destiny had suddenly fallen from the position he had falsely placed them in, and had by a rapid turn of affairs assumed the place they rightly belonged to, and which also changed considerably his own position in regard to them.
[CHAPTER XV.]
EVANGELINE'S RETURN.
"Along my father's dykes I roam again,
Among the willows by the river-side.
These miles of green I know from hill to tide
And every creek and river's ruddy stain.
Neglected long and shunned, our dead here lain.
Here where a people's dearest hope has died,
Alone of all their children scattered wide,
I scan the sad memorials that remain.
The dykes wave with the grass, but not for me,
The oxen stir not while this stranger calls.
From these new homes upon the green hill-side,
Where speech is strange and this new people free,
No voice cries out in welcome; for these halls
Give food and shelter where I may not bide."