"I am driving with a modern Evangeline, who is not the owner of the rough cart that I would have fancied her in, a few weeks ago, but of a trap that would be an ornament to Commonwealth Avenue."
"Am I the modern Evangeline?" said Agapit, in his breakneck fashion.
"To my mind she was embodied in the person of your cousin," and Vesper bowed in a sidewise fashion towards his landlady.
Rose crimsoned with pleasure. "But do you think I am like Evangeline,—she was so dark, so beautiful?"
"You are passable, Rose, passable," interjected Agapit, "but you lack the passion, the fortitude of the heroine of Mr. Nimmo's immortal countryman, whom all Acadiens venerate. Alas! only the poets and story-tellers have been true to Acadie. It is the historians who lie."
"Why do you think your cousin is lacking in passion and fortitude?" asked Vesper, who had either lost his gloomy thoughts, or had completely subdued them, and had become unusually vivacious.
"She has never loved,—she cannot. Rose, did you love your husband as I did la belle Marguerite?"
"My husband was older,—he was as a father," stammered Rose. "Certainly I did not tear my hair, I did not beat my foot on the ground when he died, as you did when la belle married the miller."
"Have you ever loved any man?" pursued Agapit, unmercifully.
"Oh, shut up, Agapit," muttered Vesper; "don't bully a woman."