She did not hesitate an instant. She did not even seem to be surprised. An expression of joyful surrender sprang to her face; in silent, solemn ecstasy she took her lover's hand, and, throwing her arm around the neck of her recovered child, she started with them on the long road down the Bay.
All this happened a few years ago, but the story is yet going on. If you come from Boston to-day, and take your wheel or carriage at Yarmouth,—for the strong winds blow one up and not down the Bay,—you will, after passing through Salmon River, Chéticamp, Meteghan, Saulnierville, and other places, come to the swinging sign of the Sleeping Water Inn.
There, if you stop, you will be taken good care of by Claudine and Mirabelle Marie,—who is really a vastly improved woman.
Perhaps among all the two hundred thousand Acadiens scattered throughout the Maritime Provinces of Canada there is not a more interesting inn than that of Sleeping Water. They will give you good meals and keep your room tidy, and they will also show you—if you are really interested in the Acadien French—a pretty cottage in the form of a horseshoe that was moved bodily away from the wicked Sleeping Water River and placed in a flat green field by the shore. To it, you will be informed, comes every year a family from Boston, consisting of an Englishman and his wife, his mother and two children. They will describe the family to you, or perhaps, if it is summer-time, you may see the Englishman himself, riding a tall bay horse and looking affectionately at a beautiful lad who accompanies him on a glossy black steed rejoicing in the name of Toochune.
The Englishman is a man of wealth and many schemes. He has organized a company for the planting and cultivation of trees along the shore of the charming, but certainly wind-swept Bay. He also is busy now surveying the coast for the carrying out of his long-cherished plan of an electric railway running along the shore.
He will yet have it, the Acadiens say, but in the meantime he amuses himself by viewing the land and interviewing the people, and when he is weary he rides home to the cottage where his pale, fragile mother is looking eagerly for her adopted, idolized grandchild Narcisse, and where his wife sits by the window and waits for him.
As she waits she often smiles and gazes down at her lap where lies a tiny creature,—a little girl whose eyes and mouth are her own, but whose hair is the hair of Vesper.