Just for that summer, too, some ships of the royal fleet anchored there off Campobello, and the Honorable Charles Seavern, third son of an Earl, and professional at his cups, swung them at his will, and made holiday meanwhile among the gay and willing folk of all the little towns around.

There was another yet, a youth growing up to fine estates away off beyond Halifax.  His father sat in the Queen’s own Parliament for the Colonies, had bent to the knightly accolade, and a change of ministry or of residence might any day create Sir Brenton peer; his mother had been Mrs. Strathsay’s dearest friend:—­this child who off and on for half his life had made her house his home and Alice his companion, while in the hearts of both children Mrs. Strathsay had cautiously planted and nursed the seed,—­a winning boy, a noble lad, a lordly man.

If Margray had not married old Johnny Graeme, it would have broken Mrs. Strathsay’s will; the will was strong; she did, she married him.  If Mary, with her white moonsheen of beauty, did not bewitch the senses of Captain Seavern, it would break Mrs. Strathsay’s pride; and few things were stronger than Mrs. Strathsay’s pride,—­unless ’t were Mary’s own.  If Effie——­but that’s nothing to the purpose.  If Alice did not become the bride of Angus Ingestre, it would break Mrs. Strathsay’s heart.  God forgive me! but I bethought me once that her heart was the weakest member in all her body.

So she kissed us, as I say, and we slid down the ten miles of river, and went sailing past the busy islands and over the broad deeps and out of the day and into the night, and then two little orphans cried themselves to sleep with their arms about each other’s necks.  After all, it was not much like my picture of the great world, this lonely sea, this plunging up from billow on to billow, this burrowing down in the heart of green-gloomed hollows, this rocking and creaking and straining, this buoyant bounding over the crests,—­yet the freedom, the monotony, the wild career of the winds fired me; it set my blood a-tingle; I liked it.  And then I thought of Angus, rocked to sleep each night, as he was now, in his ocean-cradle.  But once at school, and the world was round me; it hummed up from the streets, it boomed down from the spires.  I became a part of it, and so forgot it.  To Effie there were ever stealing rumors of yet a world beyond, of courts and coronets, of satin shimmer and glitter of gems, but they glanced off from me,—­and other than thus I have never yet found that great world that used to lie over the river.

We had been at school a happy while, and but for constant letters, and for the brief visit of Mrs. Strathsay, who had journeyed over the Atlantic for one last look at sweet home-things, and to see how all went with us, and then had flitted back again,—­but for that, home would have seemed the veriest dream that ever buzzed in an idle brain:  would so have seemed to other maidens, not to us, for the fibres