think they have anything finer than the river in Canada,"
she said. "Its width impresses one; the French villages with their
church spires are so picturesque--I wonder how many churches there are
in this part of the country. One sees them everywhere."

"You were urged to see the Ontario forests and the prairie," Millicent
remarked.

"One cannot do everything, and I'm not insatiable. I'm getting too old
to stand the shaking in the hot and dusty cars, and I can't accustom
myself to going to bed in public, without undressing. No doubt, it's a
matter of prejudice, but I've been used to more room for taking my
clothes off than they give you behind the flapping curtain."

Millicent laughed as she remembered their experiences during a journey
on a crowded express.

"Getting up is worse," she said. "However, they told us it was very
pretty and generally cool at Saguenay. Then you'll have somebody to
talk to, as Mrs. Chudleigh is coming. But didn't she make up her mind
rather suddenly?"

"I thought so, since she didn't speak of going until I sent you for the
tickets. Still, Sedgwick was sent to Ottawa, where she doesn't know
anybody, which may have had something to do with it."

Millicent, who looked very pretty in her light summer dress as she
leaned back in a deckchair, did not reply. Sun and wind had brought a
fine warm colour into her face, but her brown eyes were grave, for
there was a point upon which she must try to form a correct judgment
and she distrusted her inexperience. She was young and had a natural
love of pleasure, as well as a certain longing for excitement and a
willingness to take a risk which she had inherited from her gambling
father. Mrs. Keith had prevented her indulging these tendencies, and
the girl, thrust for the most part into the society of older people,
suffered at times from a feeling of depressing monotony.

Then she had met Captain Sedgwick, who paid her rather marked
attention, at Quebec, and at first had been attracted by the handsome
soldier and flattered by his singling her out among women of higher
station and maturer beauty; but the attraction did not last long.
There was a vein of sound sense in Millicent, and when she tested
Sedgwick by it, he did not ring true, and when Mrs. Chudleigh openly
claimed him as her property she acquiesced. Afterwards she met Blake
on board the steamer and the gratitude and admiration which a
chivalrous act of his had roused suddenly revi