they found no difficulty in keeping it.

Bytown was a Yankee village. Jacques was, after all, nothing but a
Frenchman. The native tone of religion, what there was of it, was
strongly Methodist. Jacques never went to church, and if he was
anything, was probably a Roman Catholic. Serena was something of a
sentimentalist, and a great reader of novels; but the international
love-story had not yet been invented, and the idea of getting
married to a foreigner never entered her head. I do not say that
she suspected nothing in the wild flowers, and the Sunday evening
boat-rides, and the music. She was a woman. I have said already
that she liked Jacques very much, and his violin pleased her to the
heart. But the new building by the river? I am sure she never even
thought of it once, in the way that he did.

Well, in the end of June, just after the furniture had come for the
house with the curved roof, Serena was married to Hose Ransom. He
was a young widower without children, and altogether the best
fellow, as well as the most prosperous, in the settlement. His
house stood up on the hill, across the road from the lot which
Jacques had bought. It was painted white, and it had a narrow front
porch, with a scroll-saw fringe around the edge of it; and there was
a little garden fenced in with white palings, in which Sweet
Williams and pansies and blue lupines and pink bleeding-hearts were
planted.

The wedding was at the Sportsmen's Retreat, and Jacques was there,
of course. There was nothing of the disconsolate lover about him.
The noun he might have confessed to, in a confidential moment of
intercourse with his violin; but the adjective was not in his line.