International complications had arisen at the supper table. Confronted by an English menu, the four elderly Frenchmen had held a hasty consultation over a new item which had appeared thereon. Their minds were strictly logical; they had come to the conclusion that sweetbreads were a species of cake, and they had ordered accordingly. “Mais oui,” one of them observed, as he gravely prodded the resultant tidbit with his knife and fork. “Vat ees eet?”
“Them’s the sweetbreads,” responded the waitress, who was an Hibernian and scanty of grammar.
There followed an anxious pause, while four prodding forks worked in unison.
“Huitres?” suggested one Frenchman.
“C?telettes?” added the second.
“C’est bon,” said the third, more daring than his companions.
But the fourth pushed aside his plate.
“C’est dommage!” he exclaimed, and Nancy, who shared his opinion, took refuge in her napkin.
She emerged to find Brock just taking his place beside her, and she looked up with a welcoming smile. After the too obvious devotion of the Englishman, after the self-repressed, high-strung temperament of St. Jacques, Nancy was always conscious of a certain sense of relief in the society of the jovial Canadian. It is no slight gift to be always merry, always thoughtful of the comfort of one’s companions, always at peace with one’s self and with the world. This gift Brock possessed in its entirety. Without him at her elbow, Nancy would have passed many a lonely hour in Quebec. An own brother could not have been more undemonstratively careful to heed her slightest wish. Best of all, Brock had a trick of placing himself at her service, not at all as if he were in love with her; but merely as if it were the one thing possible for him to do.
Just once, their friendship had lacked little of coming to grief. On the evening after the market episode, Nancy had gathered together her courage and had read Brock a long lecture upon his sins. An hour later, she had retired from the contest, worsted. With imperturbable good nature, Brock had assented to her charges against him. Then, swiftly turning the tables, he had summed up all of Barth’s vulnerable points and had accused her of increasing their number by an injudicious system of coddling. Nancy’s hair was red, her temper by no means imperturbable. She had defended herself with vigor and clearness. Then, with snapping eyes, she had stalked away out of the room, leaving Brock, serene and smiling, in undisturbed possession of the field. The next morning, Brock had been called out of town on business. When he returned, two days later, Nancy had met him with whole-hearted smiles. Without Brock’s genial presence, the atmosphere of The Maple Leaf became altogether too fully charged with electricity for her liking. From that time onward, Nancy remembered her hair, and fought shy of argument with the tall Canadian whose very imperturbability only rendered him the more maddening foe.
“You look as if you had heard some good news,” she assured him, even while he was unfolding his napkin.
Brock smiled with conscious satisfaction.
“So I have.”
“Tell me.”
“Not now.”
“How long must I wait?”
“A week.”
“How unkind of you, when you know I am consumed with curiosity!”
With the butterknife in his hand, Brock turned. Nancy, as she looked far into the depths of those clear gray eyes of his, was suddenly aware that all was right with Brock’s world. Moreover, she was aware that he was as eager as she herself for the week to pass away and give him the chance to speak.
“Then I really must wait,” she assented to the look in his eyes. “A week is a long time. Meanwhile, I have some news.”
“Good, I hope.”
“Certainly. We are expecting a guest, next Friday.”
“How unlucky for him!” Brock observed.
“Are you superstitious?”
“No; but you are.”
She raised her brows in question, and Brock answered the unspoken words.
“Otherwise, why do you carry a pocket edition of Sainte Anne-de-Beaupré?”
“How do you know I do?”
“Because it fell out on the floor just now, when I upset your coat. It is a very superior little Sainte Anne, made of silver.”
This time, Nancy had the grace to blush. Only the day before, she had come into possession of the dainty toy.
“That’s not superstition,” she answered; “it is merely an effigy of my patron saint.”
Brock nodded.
“For the name? I suspect I could tell who chose it.”
Again Nancy’s brows rose inquiringly.
“If you like,” she said composedly.
“Barth, of course.”
“No. I knew you would say so. Now you have forfeited your one guess,” she responded smilingly, yet with an odd little tugging at her heart, as she recalled the face of St. Jacques, as he had laid the little silver image into her outstretched palm.
“Make her your patron saint as well,” he had said briefly. “The time may come when I shall need the prayers of her name-child to help me at her shrine.”
And Nancy, looking straight into his dark eyes, had given the promise that he asked.
But now, with full intention, she was seeking to drive St. Jacques from her mind.
“You don’t ask about our guest,” she added.
“No.” Brock buttered his bread with calm deliberation. “I knew you would tell me, when you were ready.”
She fell into the trap laid by his apparent indifference.
“I am ready now. It is an old friend of ours from New York, Mr. Joseph Churchill.”
“So glad he is an old friend,” Brock responded coolly.
“Why?”
“Because he won’t complicate things, as a young man would do.”
“Mr. Churchill is twenty-five,” Nancy remarked a little severely.
“We call that rather young up here. Will he stop long?”
“A day or two.”
Brock helped himself to marmalade.
“And he comes, next Friday?”
“Yes.”
“Right, oh! See that he gets out of the way by Monday. The Maple Leaf is quite full enough, as it is.”
“But he is going to the Chateau,” Nancy explained.
“Lucky fellow to have money enough! In his place, I should probably have to seek the Lower Town. What are you going to do with him?”
Nancy smiled ingratiatingly.
“Just what I was meaning to ask you, Mr. Brock.”
Brock’s answering laugh sent Barth’s fingers in search of the string of his eyeglasses.
“There’s a snug little cell empty up at the Citadel,” he suggested. “Take him up there and let him see how he likes military hospitality. He could put in a very instructive two days, studying the position of the Bunker Hill cannon.”
Two days later, Nancy stood in the extreme bow of the Lévis ferry. Beside her, blond and big and altogether bonny, stood Mr. Joseph Churchill, obviously an American, equally obviously from New York. At the............