Out there were green islands, white villages hidden in smiling coves, passing ships, and many excursion boats. He knew well every point of interest, but each successive discovery was a new pleasure for Derrice, and, filled with the rapture of exploration, she would urge him on until the shades of evening warned them to return.
In spite of her appreciation of the world outside the Bay, she liked better the five small rivers with the Indian names that went leaping merrily down into it. Only one was navigable,—its rapids were far up,—and of this one she never tired. Day after day when bank hours were over she begged Justin to conduct her to it, and when she found herself alone with him in its sylvan solitudes she invariably fell into a state of mental intoxication.
With her hat off, one hand trailing behind her in the cool black water, shafts of sunlight flickering down between jealous leaves that endeavoured to screen from them the flaxen head and white dress, she babbled joyous self-revealings whose lightest phases were treasured by the quiet young man who sat opposite her.
She was as free and as gay as the fishes below, the birds above, or the shy wild creatures peeping timidly at her through the underbrush. Why had she been given to him? Would he ever lose her? He was not worthy of such a blessing! And sometimes he trembled in an excess of happiness that was not happiness until he had tortured himself with some suggestion of pain.
When she gently rallied him on his seriousness, he explained that at all times he experienced the deepest awe when in the presence of works fresh from the hands of the Creator. A budding tree, an opening flower, charmed him into an ecstasy beyond expression, and, although only vaguely comprehending this ecstasy, she would smile sweetly and relapse into silence herself.
Sometimes she would motion to him to change the boat's course. He did not at all times care to run into the lively picnic parties from the hotels, the sole thought of whose members was to utilise the most exquisite retreats of the river for purposes of eating and drinking. Yet he was glad to see them come,—all those strangers who made Rossignol so prosperous. He was an enthusiast on the subject of the development of his native State, and talked at length to Derrice of the great tide of travel floating ever northward, of the millions of dollars brought annually into the State by summer visitors, of the building of hotels and cottages, and of the quantity of game slaughtered in the wildernesses up the great rivers. All these were sure and certain signs that his beloved Pine Tree State was to become more and more the pleasure-ground and place of relaxation for the denizens of other States less favoured by nature.
Derrice always listened intently, then becoming a greater enthusiast than he was himself, she, to his diversion and gratification, retailed among the many strangers thronging the place, not only what he had told her, but also a vast deal of miscellaneous information that she collected relating to the industrial progress of the State, its old and successful enterprises and its new and tentative ones.
The comparatively new sardine industry she was most interested in, first on account of Captain White's connection with it, and secondly because she had in her Sunday School class some young "dressers" from the factories.
She begged Captain White to conduct her over one of the factories, and in great good-humour he complied with her request, whereupon for some days she discoursed learnedly of the various methods of catching and packing the wary herring, of the difference between home-made "Russians" and foreign "Russians," of "bar," "channel," and "shore weirs," and of other technical matters that filled her husband with amused admiration.
She was essentially domestic and home-loving in her instincts, and Justin was amazed at the rapidity with which this new trait in her character had developed.