“How many years, dear heart, since we made that winter journey, thou and I, from Jemseg to Quebec, through the illimitable snows?”

“Ten!” answers Yvonne; and the great eyes which she lifts from her writing and flashes gayly upon me grow tender with sweet remembrance. During those ten years the destinies of thrones have shifted strangely in the kaleidoscope of fate. Empires have changed hands. New France has been erased from the New World. Louisbourg has been levelled to a sheep pasture. Quebec has proved no more impregnable. The flag of England flies over Canada. My uncle, the Sieur de Briart, sleeps in a glorious grave, having fallen with Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. My cousin Marc and I, having fought and bled for France in all the last battles, and lain for months in an English hospital, have accepted the new masters of our country and been confirmed in our little estates beside the Ottawa.

286Redeeming my promise to Gr?l, I have aided him in his vengeance on the Black Abbé—a strange, dark tale which I may one day set down, if ever time makes it less painful to my memory.

Much, then, have I endured in these ten years. But the remembrance of it appears to me but as a tinted glass, through which I am enabled to contemplate the full sun of my happiness.

Yvonne in these ten years has changed but to grow more beautiful. Bodily, there was, I think, no room for that change; but growth is the law of such a spirit as hers, and so into her perfect eyes, wells of light as of old, has come a deeper and more immeasurable wisdom. As to this perennial potency of her beauty, I know that I am not deluded by my passion; for I perceive the homage it compels from all who come within its beneficent influence. Even her mother, a laughingly malicious critic, tells me that my eyes see true in this—(for Giles de Lamourie, having sold his ample acres in Nova Scotia, and forgiven ancient grudges, has come here to live with Yvonne). Father Fafard, when he visits us from his Bonaventure parish, says the same; but his eyes are blind with loving prejudice. When we go into Montreal for the months of December and January, exchanging for a little the quiet of our country home for the glitter of rout and function, no other 287court so choice, so loyal, and so revering as that which Yvonne gathers about her. The wise, drawn by her wit, are held fast by her beauty; while the gay, drawn by her beauty, rise to a worship of her wit and worth.

Yvonne’s small hands are white and alive and restless as on that day in the Grand Pré or............