Agapit fairly ran to the stable, and as he ran he muttered, "We are all very young,—the old ones say that trouble cuts into the hearts of youth. Let us pray our Lord for old age."
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
NARCISSE GOES IN SEARCH OF THE ENGLISHMAN.
"L'homme s'agite, Dieu le mène."
Mrs. Nimmo was a very unhappy woman. She had never before had a trouble equal to this trouble, and, as she sat at the long window in the bedroom of her absent son, she drearily felt that it was eating the heart and spirit out of her.
Vesper was away, and she had refused to share his unhappy wanderings, for she knew that he did not wish her to do so. Very calmly and coldly he had told her that his engagement to Rose à Charlitte was over. He assigned no cause for it, and Mrs. Nimmo, in her desperation, earnestly wished that he had never heard of the Acadiens, that Rose à Charlitte had never been born, and that the little peninsula of Nova Scotia had never been traced on the surface of the globe.
It was a lovely evening of late summer. The square in which she lived was cool and quiet, for very few of its inhabitants had come back from their summer excursions. Away in the distance, beyond the leafy common, she could hear the subdued roar of the city, but on the brick pavements about her there was scarcely a footfall.
The window at which she sat faced the south. In winter her son's room was flooded with sunlight, but in summer the branching elm outside put forth a kindly screen of leaves to shield it from the too oppressive heat. Her glance wandered between the delicate lace curtains, swaying to and fro, to this old elm that seemed a member of her family. How much her son loved it,—and with an indulgent thought of Vesper's passion for the natives of the outdoor world, a disagreeable recollection of the Acadien woman's child leaped into her mind.
How absurdly fond of trees and flowers he had been, and what a fanciful, unnatural child he was, altogether. She had never liked him, and he had never liked her, and she wrinkled her brows at the distasteful remembrance of him.