mind that; always faint and shadowy and gray.

It was all caste. Caste in London, caste in _Le Bos Canada_, all the
same. Because she was a _St. Hilaire_. Her full name--_Hortense
Angelique De Repentigny de St. Hilaire_--how it grates on me afresh
with its aristocratic plentitude. She is well-born, certainly;
better born than most of these girls I have seen here in London,
driving, walking, riding in the Parks. They wear their hair over
cushions too. Freckled skins, high cheek-bones, square foreheads,
spreading eyebrows--they shouldn't wear it so. It suits Hortense--
with her pale patrician outline and her dark pencilled eyebrows, and
her little black ribbon and amulet around her neck. _O, Marie, priey
pour nous qui avous recours a vous_! Once I walked out to _Beau
Sejour_. She did not expect me and I crept through the leafy ravine to
the pinewood, then on to the steps, and so up to the terrace.
Through the French window I could see her seated at the long table
opposite Father Couture. She lives alone with the good Pere. She is
the last one of the noble line, and he guards her well and guards
her money too.

"I do remember that it vill be all for ze Church," she has said to me.
And the priest has taught her all she knows, how to sew and embroider,
and cook and read, though he never lets her read anything but works
on religion. Religion, always religion! He has brought her up like a
nun, crushed the life out of her. Until I found her out, found my
jewel out. It is Tennyson who says that. But his "Maud" was freer to
woo than Hortense, freer to love and kiss and hold--my God! that
night while I watched them studying and bending over those cursed
works on the Martyrs and the Saints and the Mission houses--I saw him--
him--that old priest--take her in his arms and caress her, drink her