"Then what was wrong with you?"
"Nothing, since you are again cheerful," she said, in tones so doleful that Vesper burst into one of his rare laughs, and Rose, laughing with him, brushed the tears from her face.
"There was something running in my mind that made me feel gloomy," he said, after a short silence. "It has been haunting me all day."
Her eager glance was a prayer to him to share the cause of his unhappiness with her, and he recited, in a low, penetrating voice, the lines:
"Mon Dieu, pour fuir la mort n'est-il aucun moyen?
Quoi? Dans un jour peut-être immobile et glacé....
Aujourd'hui avenir, le monde, la pensée
Et puis, demain, ... plus rien."
Rose had never heard anything like this, and she was troubled, and turned her blue eyes to the sky, where a trailing white cloud was soaring above the dark cloud-bank below. "It is like a soul going up to our Lord," she murmured, reverently.
Vesper would not shock her further with his heterodoxy. "Forget what I said," he went on, lightly, "and let me beg you never to put anything on your head but that handkerchief. You Acadien women wear it with such an air."
"But it is because we know how to tie it. Look,—this is how the Italian women in Boston carry those colored ones," and, pulling the piece of silk from her head, she arranged it in severe lines about her face.
"A decided difference," Vesper was saying, when Agapit came around the corner of the house, driving Toochune, who was attached to a shining dog-cart.