"Therefore! All easy things--safe?"

He was clumsy at this kind of refined innuendo, and considered before
replying.

"No, perhaps not. But I give you my word not to disturb the
equilibrium again."

The lake, a basin of clear water, small as Lower Canadian lakes go, and
framed with thick foliage reaching to the edge, was absolutely silent,
absolutely deserted, on this warm afternoon. Ringfield found it almost
too hot to talk, but his companion seemed to enjoy the unburdening of
various confidences, and as she had such a willing listener she had
every opportunity, of taking her own time, and of delivering herself in
her own way, of a remarkable tale.

That, within two days of his enforced sojourn at St. Ignace, the young
preacher found himself thus--floating on a silent desolate lake in one
of the remotest parishes of Quebec, listening to a family history of
mediaeval import from the lips of a woman, young too, cultivated,
self-possessed to the degree of hauteur, whose Christian name was as
yet unknown to him, was in itself remarkable.

Ringfield, ardent, gifted, good, inherited directness of aim, purity of
ideals, and narrowness of vision, from the simple working stock from
which he had sprung, and it would have been easy for a man of the world
to foresee the limitations existing in such a nature. When
mademoiselle therefore began the Clairville history by relating some
circumstances in the flighty career of the Sieur De Clairville, hinting
at certain deflections and ridiculing uncertain promises of
reformation, of reparation--for even the seventeenth century had its
cant--the matter was far from being either real or relevant to her
listener. What had he to do with a bundle of old-world memoirs, even
when edited and brought up to date by an interesting woman! What to
him was the spotless character of the ignoble Francois, son of a
butcher, created a Clairville for his plebeian virtues, or the lives of
each succeeding descendant of Francois, growing always a little richer,
a little more polished, till in time the wheel turned and the change
came in the fortunes of the house which culminated in the present! All
these were mere abstractions, dull excerpts from some period of remote
and unfamiliar history, because that system which gave him his secular
education did not include knowledge of his country from an historical
standpoint.

Macaulay and Alison, Gibbon and Grote, Motley and Bancroft--but not yet