ll ceremonies and solemnities, tried gently
to lead her aright, and, with rare wisdom, in her own way, not his. But
through it all, in his frequent visits to the Agency, and in the visits
of the Douglas family to the hermitage, his real interest was centred in
the Protestant sister, the tall unconscious young girl who had not yet,
as he said to himself, begun to live. He shook his head often as he
thought of her. "In France, even in England, she would be guarded," he
said to himself; "but here! It is an excellent country, this America of
theirs, for the pioneer, the New-Englander, the adventurer, and the
farmer; but for a girl like Anne? No." And then, if Anne was present,
and happened to meet his eye, she smiled back so frankly that he forgot
his fears. "After all, I suppose there are hundreds of such girls in
this country of theirs," he admitted, in a grumbling way, to his French
mind, "coming up like flowers everywhere, without any guardianship at
all. But it is all wrong, all wrong."

The priest generally placed America as a nation in the hands of
possessive pronouns of the third person plural; it was a safe way of
avoiding responsibility, and of being as scornful, without offending any
one, as he pleased. One must have some outlet.

The summer wore on. Rast wrote frequently, and Anne, writing the first
letters of her life in reply, found that she liked to write. She saved
in her memory all kinds of things to tell him: about their favorite
trees, about the birds that had nests in the garden that season, about
the fishermen and their luck, about the unusual quantity of raspberries
on the mainland, about the boys, about Tita. Something, too, about Bacon
and Sir Thomas Browne, selections from whose volumes she was now reading
under the direction of the chaplain. But she never put down any of her
own thoughts, opinions, or feelings: her letters were curious examples
of purely impersonal objective writing. Egotism, the under-current of
most long letters as of most long conversations also, the telling of how
this or that was due to us, affected us, was regarded by us, was
prophesied, was commended, was objected to, was feared, was thoroughly
understood, was held in restraint, was despised or scorned by us, and
all our opinions on the subject, which, however important in itself, we
present always surrounded by a large indefinite aureola of our own
personality--this was entirely wanting in Anne Douglas's letters and
conver