The Intriguers | Page 6

ask, how was it he let you come to his flat?"
"I forced myself upon him. My mother died long ago, and her unmarried sisters took care of me. They lived very simply in a small secluded country house: two old-fashioned Evangelicals, gentle but austere, studying small economies, giving all they could away. In winter we embroidered for missionary bazaars; in summer we spent the days in a quiet, walled garden. It was all very peaceful, but I grew restless; and when I heard that my father's health was failing I felt that I must go to him. My aunts were grieved and alarmed, but they said they dare not hinder me if I thought it my duty."
Stirred by troubled memories and perhaps encouraged by the sympathy he showed, she had spoken on impulse without reserve, and Blake listened with pity. The girl, brought up, subject to wholesome Puritanical influences, in such surroundings as she had described, must have suffered a cruel shock when suddenly plunged into the society of the rakes and gamblers who frequented her father's flat.
"Could you not have gone back when you were no longer needed?" he asked.
"No," she said; "it would not have been fair. I had changed since I left my aunts. They were very sensitive, and I think the difference they must have noticed in me would have jarred on them. I should have brought something alien into their unworldly life. It was too late to return; I had to follow the path I had chosen."
Blake mused a while, watching the lights of Three Rivers fade astern and the broad white wake of the paddles stream back across the glassy surface of the lake. The girl must have learned much of human failings since she left her sheltered home, but he thought the sweetness of character which could not be spoiled by knowledge of evil was greatly to be admired. He was, however, a man of action and not a philosopher.
"Well," he said, "I appreciate your letting me talk to you; but it's cold and getting late, and you have sat on deck long enough. I'll see that somebody looks after the animals."
Millicent felt dubious, though she was sleepy and tired.
"If anything happened to her pets, Mrs. Keith would not forgive me."
"I'll engage that something will happen to some of them very soon unless you promise to go to your room," Blake laughed. Then he called a deckhand. "What have you to do?"
"Stand here until the watch is changed."
"Then, you can keep an eye on these baskets. If any of the beasts makes an alarming noise, send to my room, the second, forward, port side. Look me up before we get to Montreal."
"That's all right, sir," replied the man.
Blake turned to Millicent and held out his hand as she rose.
"Now," he said, "you can go to rest with a clear conscience."
She left him with a word of thanks, wondering whether she had been indiscreet, and why she had told him so much. She knew nothing to his advantage except one chivalrous action, and she had not desired to arouse his pity, but he had an honest face and had shown an understanding sympathy which touched her, because she had seldom experienced it. He had left the army with a stain upon his name; but she felt very confident that he had not merited his disgrace.

CHAPTER III
THE COUSINS
Dinner was over at the Windsor, in Montreal, and Mrs. Keith was sitting with Mrs. Ashborne in the square between the hotel and St. Catharine's Street. A cool air blew uphill from the river, and the patch of grass with its fringe of small, dusty trees had a certain picturesqueness in the twilight. Above it the wooded crest of the mountain rose darkly against the evening sky; lights glittered behind the network of thin branches and fluttering leaves along the sidewalk, and the dome of the cathedral bulked huge and shadowy across the square. Downhill, toward St. James's, rose towering buildings, with the rough-hewn front of the Canadian Pacific station prominent among them, and the air was filled with the clanging of street-cars and the tolling of locomotive bells. Once or twice, however, when the throb of the traffic momentarily subsided, music rose faint and sweet from the cathedral, and Mrs. Keith turned to listen. She had heard the uplifted voices before, through her open window in the early morning when the city was silent and its busy toilers slept, and now it seemed to her appropriate that they could not be wholly drowned by its hoarse commercial clamor.
The square served as a cool retreat for the inhabitants of crowded tenements and those who had nowhere else to go, but Margaret Keith was not fastidious about her company. She was interested in the unkempt immigrants who, waiting for