BIDIANE
[CHAPTER I.]
A NEW ARRIVAL AT SLEEPING WATER.
"But swift or slow the days will pass,
The longest night will have a morn,
And to each day is duly born
A night from Time's inverted glass."
—Aminta.
Five years have passed away,—five long years. Five times the Acadien farmers have sown their seeds. Five times they have gathered their crops. Five times summer suns have smiled upon the Bay, and five times winter winds have chilled it. And five times five changes have there been in Sleeping Water, though it is a place that changes little.
Some old people have died, some new ones have been born, but chief among all changes has been the one effected by the sometime presence, and now always absence, of the young Englishman from Boston, who had come so quietly among the Acadiens, and had gone so quietly, and yet whose influence had lingered, and would always linger among them.
In the first place, Rose à Charlitte had given up the inn. Shortly after the Englishman had gone away, her uncle had died, and had left her, not a great fortune, but a very snug little sum of money—and with a part of it she had built herself a cottage on the banks of Sleeping Water River, where she now lived with Célina, her former servant, who had, in her devotion to her mistress, taken a vow never to marry unless Rose herself should choose a husband. This there seemed little likelihood of her doing. She had apparently forsworn marriage when she rejected the Englishman. All the Bay knew that he had been violently in love with her, all the Bay knew that she had sent him away, but none knew the reason for it. She had apparently loved him,—she had certainly never loved any other man. It was suspected that Agapit LeNoir was in the secret, but he would not discuss the Englishman with any one, and, gentle and sweet as Rose was, there were very few who cared to broach the subject to her.