She did. In her deep blue eyes he could readily perceive the quick flash of maternal love and sympathy whenever her boy spoke to her. She was young, too, extremely young, to have the care of rearing a child. She must have been married in her cradle, and with that thought in mind he said, "Do Acadien women marry at an early age?"
"Not more so than the English," said Mrs. Rose, with a shrug of her graceful, sloping shoulders, "though I was but young,—but seventeen. But my husband wished it so. He had built this house. He had been long ready for marriage," and she glanced at the wall behind Vesper.
The young man turned around. Just behind him hung the enlarged photograph of a man of middle age,—a man who must have been many years older than his young wife, and whose death had, evidently, not left a permanent blank in her affections.
In a naïve, innocent way she imparted a few more particulars to Vesper with regard to her late husband, and, as he rose from the table, she followed him to the parlor and said, gently, "Perhaps monsieur will register."
Vesper sat down before the visitors' book on the table, and, taking up a pen, wrote, "Vesper L. Nimmo, The Evening News, Boston."
After he had pressed the blotting-paper on his words, and pushed the book from him, his landlady stretched out her hand in childlike curiosity. "Vesper," she said,—"that name is beautiful; it is in a hymn to the blessed virgin; but Evening News,—surely it means not a journal?"
Vesper assured her that it did.
The young French widow's face fell. She gazed at him with a sudden and inexplicable change of expression, in which there was something of regret, something of reproach. "Il faut que je m'en aille" (I must go away), she murmured, reverting to her native language, and she swiftly withdrew.
Vesper lifted his level eyebrows and languidly strolled out to the veranda. "The Acadienne evidently entertains some prejudice against newspaper men. If my dear father were here he would immediately proceed, in his inimitable way, to clear it from her mind. As for me, I am not sufficiently interested," and he listlessly stretched himself out on a veranda settle.
"Monsieur," said a little voice, in deliberate French, "will you tell me a story about a tree?"