“Leaving sorrowing admirers behind you,” said her companion imperturbably.
“According to me—yes.”
“You would not overstate,” he said hastily; “you are not like most girls.”
“Did you never see any one like me?” she asked vivaciously.
“No,” he said quietly; “you are an anomaly. A Frenchwoman educated among English people and speaking your own language with a foreign accent—half of you goes in one direction, half in another.”
“Ah, you understand me, Captain Macartney,” said the girl with an eager gesture. “You will know what I mean when I say that at times I seem to feel in my veins the gay French blood running beside the sober English.”
“Yes, I understand you,” he said with a smile, and he fixed his gaze admiringly on her dark eyes that were wandering restlessly from shore to shore of the entrance to the beautiful harbor.
“Away down there is the place of wrecks,” she said, waving her hand toward the western coast. “Some of my countrymen named it Saint Cendre, and the careless Nova Scotians corrupted it into Sambro. Do you hear that, Captain Macartney?”
The man’s glance had suddenly dropped to the sea and he was staring at it as if he were trying to wrest some secret from it. Now he roused himself. “Yes, Miss Delavigne, I hear.”
“The old name of the harbor was Chebucto,” the girl went on; “Chebook-took—chief haven. The Indian and French names should still remain; it was unfair in Englishmen to drive them out. Is not Acadie more charming than Nova Scotia, and Chebucto than Halifax?”