"What's bred in the bone will come out in the blood," she said, "and bad blood is more assertive than good."
Evans loved his mother better than any other soul except Elise, and he would go far and deny himself much to obey even her most unreasonable whim, but his love for Elise was too fervid a passion to be stifled for the sake of a war-born prejudice. He would win her; yes, he must win her; and he waited only the winning moment to plead openly for his happiness.
CHAPTER VIII
It was a morning in late September that Elise and Rutledge went for their last canoe ride on the mighty river. Mrs. Phillips and her daughters were to leave for home on an early afternoon train, and Mrs. Rutledge and Evans for Montreal an hour later.
It was a day to live. By an occasional splash of yellow or red among the green that lined the riverside and clothed the diminutive island in the stream, Summer gave notice that in thirty days Nature must find another tenant; and a taste of chill in the air was Winter's advance agent looking over the premises and arranging to decorate them in the soberer grays and browns for the coming of his serious and mighty master.
The lassitude of the hot days was gone, and life and impulse were in the autumn breeze. There was not a suggestion of melancholy or decay or death in earth, air or sky. It was more as if a strong man was risen from drowsy sleep and stretching his muscles and breathing a fresh air into his lungs for a day of vigorous doing. Not exhaustion but strength, not languor but briskness, not the end but the beginning, was indicated in every breath and aspect of Nature.
It was a morning not to doubt but to believe: and Rutledge felt the tightening spring in mind and body and heart, and the bracing influence made his love and his hopes to vibrate and thrill. As with easy strokes he sent the canoe through the water he drank in the fresh beauty of Elise as an invigorating draught. She was so en rapport with the morning and the sunlight and the life as she sat facing and smiling upon him, her cheeks aglow with health and her face alight with the exquisite keenness of joy in living, that she seemed to him the incarnate spirit of the day.
The crisp tingle in the air was not without its spell upon Elise. No blood could respond more quickly than hers to Nature's quickening heart-beats, and it sang in her pulses with unaccustomed sensations that morning. She looked upon Rutledge as he smartly swung the paddle, and was struck with the strength he seemed to possess without the coarse obtrusion of muscle. She accredited the easiness of his movements to the smooth water, in which he had kept the canoe because of his desire to be as little distracted as possible from contemplation of Elise's charms and graces. The swing of his body and arms was as graceful as if he had learned it from a dancing-master, and there was a touch of daintiness about it which was his only personal trait that Elise had positively designated in her mind as not belonging to her ideal man. She did not object to it on its own account, but surmised it might have its origin in some vague unmanly weakness—and weakness in a man she despised.
She had talked to him of a score of things since they had embarked, passing rapidly from one to another in order to keep him away from the one subject he seemed attracted to from any point of the conversational compass. At the moment she had been so clearly impressed with his almost feminine gracefulness the conversation was taking a dangerous swerve, she thought; and for a minute she was at a loss how to divert the course of language from the matter nearest his heart. In a blind effort to do so she unthinkingly challenged him to prove his sterner strength which she had never seen put to the test.
"It's easy going here, isn't it?" she said. "What a pity we couldn't have one visit to the island before we go away."