"You know my friend, Mr. Anderson, madam?"
"I made acquaintance with him on the journey yesterday. He has been most kind to us."
"He is a very remarkable man. When he gets into the House, he will be heard of. He will perhaps make his mark on Canada."
"You and he are old friends?"
"Since our student days. I was of course at the French College--and he at McGill. But we saw a great deal of each other. He used to come home with me in his holidays."
"He told me something of his early life."
"Did he? It is a sad history, and I fear we--my family, that is, who are so attached to him--have only made it sadder. Three years ago he was engaged to my sister. Then the Archbishop forbade mixed marriages. My sister broke it off, and now she is a nun in the Ursuline Convent at Quebec."
"Oh, poor things!" cried Elizabeth, her eye on Anderson's distant face.
"My sister is quite happy," said Mariette sharply. "She did her duty. But my poor friend suffered. However, now he has got over it. And I hope he will marry. He is very dear to me, though we have not a single opinion in the world in common."
Elizabeth kept him talking. The picture of Anderson drawn for her by the admiring but always critical affection of his friend, touched and stirred her. His influence at college, the efforts by which he had placed his brothers in the world, the sensitive and generous temperament which had won him friends among the French Canadian students, he remaining all the time English of the English; the tendency to melancholy--a personal and private melancholy--which mingled in him with a passionate enthusiasm for Canada, and Canada's future; Mariette drew these things for her, in a stately yet pungent French that affected her strangely, as though the French of Saint Simon--or something like it--breathed again from a Canadian mouth. Anderson meanwhile was standing outside with the Chief Justice. She threw a glance at him now and then, wondering about his love affair. Had he really got over it?--or was that M. Mariette's delusion? She liked, on the contrary, to think of him as constant and broken-hearted!