river defined itself
by the varicolored lights of the ships and steamers that lay, dark,
motionless bulks, upon its broad breast; the lights of Point Lewis
swarmed upon the other shore; the Lower Town, two hundred feet below
them, stretched an alluring mystery of clustering roofs and lamplit
windows and dark and shining streets around the mighty rock,
mural-crowned. Suddenly a spectacle peculiarly Northern and
characteristic of Quebec revealed itself; a long arch brightened over
the northern horizon; the tremulous flames of the aurora, pallid violet
or faintly tinged with crimson, shot upward from it, and played with
a weird apparition and evanescence to the zenith. While the strangers
looked, a gun boomed from the citadel, and the wild sweet notes of the
bugle sprang out upon the silence.

Then they all said, "How perfectly in keeping everything has been!" and
sauntered back to the hotel.

The Colonel went into the office to give the clerk another turn on the
rack, and make him confess to a hidden apartment somewhere, while Isabel
left her husband to Mrs. Ellison in the parlor, and invited Miss Kitty
to look at her coop in the fifth story. As they approached, light and
music and laughter stole out of an open door next hers, and Isabel,
distinguishing the voices of the theatrical party, divined that this
was the sick-chamber, and that they were again cheering up the afflicted
member of the troupe. Some one was heard to say, "Well, 'ow do you feel
now, Charley?" and a sound of subdued swearing responded, followed by
more laughter, and the twanging of a guitar, and a snatch of song, and a
stir of feet and dresses as for departure.

The two listeners shrank together; as women they could not enjoy these
proofs of the jolly camaraderie existing among the people of the
troupe. They trembled as before the merriment of as many light-hearted,
careless, good-natured young men: it was no harm, but it was dismaying;
and, "Dear!" cried Isabel, "what shall we do?"

"Go back," said Miss Ellison, boldly, and back they ran to the parlor,
where they found Basil and the Colonel and his wife in earnest conclave.
The Colonel, like a shrewd strategist, was making show of a desperation
more violent than his wife's, who was thus naturally forced into the
attitude of moderating his fury.

"Well, Fanny, that's all he can do for us; and I do think it 's the most
outrageous thing in the world! It 's real mean!"

Fanny perceived a bold paro