l; for people in Quebec have time to note strangers who linger there,
and Kitty and Mr. Arbuton had come to be well-known figures, different
from the fleeting tourists on their rounds; and, indeed, as sojourners
they themselves perceived their poetic distinction from mere birds of
passage.

Indoors they resorted much to the little entry-window looking out on the
Ursulines' Garden. Two chairs stood confronted there, and it was hard
for either of the young people to pass them without sinking a moment
into one of them, and this appeared always to charm another presence
into the opposite chair. There they often lingered in the soft
forenoons, talking in desultory phrase of things far and near, or
watching, in long silences, the nuns pacing up and down in the garden
below, and waiting for the pensive, slender nun, and the stout, jolly
nun whom Kitty had adopted, and whom she had gayly interpreted to him as
an allegory of Life in their quaint inseparableness; and they played
that the influence of one or other nun was in the ascendant, according
as their own talk was gay or sad. In their relation, people are not so
different from children; they like the same thing over and over again;
they like it the better the less it is in itself.

At times Kitty would come with a book in her hand (one finger shut in to
keep the place),--some latest novel, or a pirated edition of Longfellow,
recreantly purchased at a Quebec bookstore; and then Mr. Arbuton must
ask to see it; and he read romance or poetry to her by the hour. He
showed to as much advantage as most men do in the serious follies of
wooing; and an influence which he could not defy, or would not, shaped
him to all the sweet, absurd demands of the affair. From time to time,
recollecting himself, and trying to look consequences in the face, he
gently turned the talk upon Eriecreek, and endeavored to possess himself
of some intelligible image of the place, and of Kitty's home and
friends. Even then, the present was so fair and full of content, that
his thoughts, when they reverted to the future, no longer met the
obstacles that had made him recoil from it before. Whatever her past had
been, he could find some way to weaken the ties that bound her to it; a
year or two of Europe would leave no trace of Eriecreek; without effort
of his, her life would adapt itself to his own, and cease to be a part
of the lives of those people there; again and again his amiable
imaginations--they were