Lyndsay chatted with his guides of the salmon, and of his luggage and stores, sent up the day before. Aunt Anne and her favorite Ned were silent for a time; but the boy’s glance roamed restlessly from sky to stream, and up over the great dim hills. At last he said:
“Hark, Aunt Anne; how loud things sound at night!”
“Them’s the rapids,” said Tom, in tones that made Miss Lyndsay start. “Them’s a mile away.”
“I suppose, Ned, that when all one’s other senses are more or less unused, the ear may hear more distinctly; at all events, what you say is true, I think. If I want to hear very plainly, I am apt to shut my eyes—good music always makes me do that.”
“That’s so,” said John. He considered himself quite free to have his share in the talk. “When I’m callin’ moose, I most allus shuts my eyes to listen to them trumpetin’ back. Dory Maybrook was a-sayin’ that same thing las’ Toosday a week. We was a-settin’ out by her wood-pile. An’ she sat there a-thinkin’. An’ says she, ‘It’s cur’ous how you can hear things at night.’ Jus’ like you said. Hiram he was a-choppin’.”
“Who is Dory Maybrook?” said Ned.
“Well, she’s Dory Maybrook; she’s Hiram’s wife. Hiram’s her husband,” and he laughed,—laughed as he talked, so that the noise of it boomed across the wide waters.
Again for a while they were silent, asking no more questions. The aunt was wondering what could have given big Tom his overpowering voice, and how it would affect one to live with such an organ. She turned it over in her mind in all its droller aspects, imagining Tom making love, or at his sonorous devotions, for to Anne Lyndsay there were few things in life remote from the possibility of humorous relation.
Twice the boy asked if she were comfortable, or warm enough, and, reassured, fell back into the possession of the deepening night and the black water, whence, suddenly, here and there, flashed something white through the blackness, like, as the lad thought, the snowy wings of the turning sea-gulls he had seen over the St. Lawrence at break of day.
In the other canoe, far behind and out of sight, Rose Lyndsay lay, propped against the baggage, in delicious contentment of mind and body. It was a vast and satisfying change from the completed civilizations of the world of Europe, where for a year she had wandered with Anne Lyndsay. Three weeks before the evening on which begins my tale, she was in London, and now she was greeted with a sudden sense of emancipation from the world of conventionalities. Neither father nor mother was exclusively represented in this happily fashioned womanhood. And thus it was that her inherited qualities so modified one another that people missed the resemblances, and said only that she was like none of her people.