best; but the picnic parties were profitable, and he took them whenever
he could. He kept apart, however, from the merry-makers as much as
possible, and was always glad at night when he had landed his noisy
cargo safe back at the Charlottetown piers.

This disposition on his part to hold himself aloof was greatly
irritating to the Charlottetown girls, and to no one of them so much as
to pretty Katie McCloud, who, because she was his second cousin and had
known him all her life, felt, and not without reason, that he ought to
pay her something in the shape or semblance of attention when she was on
board his boat, even if she were a member of a large and gay party, most
of whom were strangers to him. There was another reason, too; but Katie
had kept it so long locked in the bottom of her heart that she hardly
realized its force and cogency, and, if she had, would have laughed, and
put it as far from her thoughts as she could.

The truth was, Katie had been in love with Donald ever since she was ten
years old and he was twenty,--a long time, seeing that she was now
thirty and he forty; and never once, either in their youth or their
middle age, had there been a word of love-making between them. All the
same, deep in her heart the good little Katie had kept the image of
Donald in sacred tenderness by itself. No other man's love-making,
however earnest,--and Katie had been by no means without lovers,--had so
much as touched this sentiment. She judged them all by this secret
standard, and found them all wanting. She did not pine, neither did she
take a step of forwardness, or even coquettish advance, to Donald. She
was too full of Scotch reticence for that. The only step she did take,
in hope of bringing him nearer to her, was the going to Charlottetown to
learn the milliner's trade.