them forever, and in the mean time why should he not try to please and
be pleased? There might, to be sure, have been many reasons why he
should not do this; but however the balance stood he now yielded himself
passively to his fate. He was polite to Mrs. Ellison, he was attentive
to Kitty, and as far as he could he entered into the fantastic spirit of
her talk with the colonel. He was not a dull man; he had quite an apt
wit of his own, and a neat way of saying things; but humor always seemed
to him something not perfectly well bred; of course he helped to praise
it in some old-established diner-out, or some woman of good fashion,
whose _mots_ it was customary to repeat, and he even tolerated it in
books; but he was at a loss with these people, who looked at life in so
bizarre a temper, yet without airiness or pretension, nay, with a
whimsical readiness to acknowledge kindred in every droll or laughable
thing.

The boat stopped at Tadoussac on her return, and among the spectators
who came down to the landing was a certain very pretty,
conscious-looking, silly, bridal-faced young woman,--imaginably the
belle of the season at that forlorn watering-place,--who before coming
on board stood awhile attended by a following of those elderly imperial
and colonial British who heavily flutter round the fair at such resorts.
She had an air of utterly satisfied vanity, in which there was no harm
in the world, and when she saw that she had fixed the eyes of the
shoreward-gazing passengers, it appeared as if she fell into a happy
trepidation too blissful to be passively borne; she moistened her pretty
red lips with her tongue, she twitched her mantle, she settled the bow
at her lovely throat, she bridled and tossed her graceful head.

"What should you do next, Kitty?" asked the colonel, who had been
sympathetically intent upon all this.