“It is quite as round and quite as much like a plum pudding as when I left it,” she said merrily; “and it fixes on me its glittering eye in the same manner that it did when I, a little child, went down this harbor to countries that I knew nothing about, and the fog bell seemed to cry, ‘Adieu, adieu, another gone from the pleasant land.’”
“But you have returned,” said the man, biting his lip to hide a smile.
“I have; many have not. You have read of the ’Cajiens of Louisiana and other places. They went but did not return; their sore hearts are buried among strangers.”
“And you,” he said curiously, “are you going to remain in Canada?”
“Yes,” said the girl softly; “I shall never leave it again.”
“But your guardians; suppose they——” he stopped abruptly.
“I shall live and die in my native land. They will not prevent me,” she said calmly.
He maintained a polite, though an unsatisfied silence.
“We are looking toward the east, we forget the west,” said the girl turning around. “See, there is York Redoubt, and Sandwich Point, and Falkland with its chapel—dear little Falkland, ‘a nest for fisher people’—and there is the entrance to the Northwest Arm.”
For the twentieth time that evening Captain Macartney smiled at the girl’s enthusiasm. Her eyes were turned lovingly toward the narrow strip of salt water that runs up like an arm behind the peninsula on which the city of Halifax is built.