THE COUSINS

Dinner was over at the Windsor, in Montreal, and Mrs. Keith was sitting
with Mrs. Ashborne in the square between the hotel and St. Catharine's
Street. A cool air blew uphill from the river, and the patch of grass
with its fringe of small, dusty trees had a certain picturesqueness in
the twilight. Above it the wooded crest of the mountain rose darkly
against the evening sky; lights glittered behind the network of thin
branches and fluttering leaves along the sidewalk, and the dome of the
cathedral bulked huge and shadowy across the square. Downhill, toward
St. James's, rose towering buildings, with the rough-hewn front of the
Canadian Pacific station prominent among them, and the air was filled
with the clanging of street-cars and the tolling of locomotive bells.
Once or twice, however, when the throb of the traffic momentarily
subsided, music rose faint and sweet from the cathedral, and Mrs. Keith
turned to listen. She had heard the uplifted voices before, through
her open window in the early morning when the city was silent and its
busy toilers slept, and now it seemed to her appropriate that they
could not be wholly drowned by its hoarse commercial clamor.

The square served as a cool retreat for the inhabitants of crowded
tenements and those who had nowhere else to go, but Margaret Keith was
not fastidious about her company. She was interested in the unkempt
immigrants who, waiting for a west-bound train, lay upon the grass,
surrounded by their tired children; and she had sent Millicent down the
street to buy fruit to distribute among the travelers. She liked to
watch the French Canadian girls who slipped quietly up the broad
cathedral steps. They were the daughters of the rank and file, but
their movements were graceful and they were tastefully dressed. Then
the blue-shirted, sinewy men, who strolled past, smoking, roused her