He met her at the top of the inclined tramway with a face of exemplary unconsciousness, and he listened with her to the tale their coachman told, as they sat in a pretty arbor looking out on the Rapids, of a Frenchman and his wife.  This Frenchman had returned, one morning, from a stroll on Goat Island, and reported with much apparent concern that his wife had fallen into the water, and been carried over the Fall.  It was so natural for a man to grieve for the loss of his wife, under the peculiar circumstances, that every one condoled with the widower; but when a few days later, her body was found, and the distracted husband refused to come back from New York to her funeral, there was a general regret that he had not been arrested.  A flash of conviction illumed the whole fact to Basil’s guilty consciousness:  this unhappy Frenchman had paid a dollar for the use of an oil-skin suit at the foot of the Fall, and had been ashamed to confess the swindle to his wife, till, in a moment of remorse and madness, he shouted the fact into her ear, and then Basil looked at the mother of his children, and registered a vow that if he got away from Niagara without being forced to a similar excess he would confess his guilt to Isabel at the very first act of spendthrift profusion she committed.  The guide pointed out the rock in the Rapids to which Avery had clung for twenty-four hours before he was carried over the Falls, and to the morbid fancy of the deceitful husband Isabel’s bonnet ribbons seemed to flutter from the pointed reef.  He could endure the pretty arbor no longer.  “Come, children!” he cried, with a wild, unnatural gayety; “let us go to Goat Island, and see the Bridge to the Three Sisters, that your mother was afraid to walk back on after she had crossed it.”

“For shame, Basil!” retorted Isabel.  “You know it was you who were afraid of that bridge.”

The children, who knew the story by heart, laughed with their father at the monstrous pretension; and his simulated hilarity only increased upon paying a toll of two dollars at the Goat Island bridge.

“What extortion!” cried Isabel, with an indignation that secretly unnerved him.  He trembled upon the verge of confession; but he had finally the moral force to resist.  He suffered her to compute the cost of their stay at Niagara without allowing those three dollars to enter into her calculation; he even began to think what justificative extravagance he could tempt her to.  He suggested the purchase of local bric-a-brac; he asked her if she would not like to dine at the International, for old times’ sake.  But she answered, with disheartening virtue, that they must not think of such a thing, after what they had spent already.  Nothing, perhaps, marked the confirmed husband in Basil more than these hidden fears and reluctances.

In the mean time Isabel ignorantly abandoned herself to the charm of the place, which she found unimpaired, in spite of the reported ravages of improvement about Niagara.  Goat Island was still the sylvan solitude of twelve years ago, haunted by even fewer nymphs and dryads than of old.  The air was full of the perfume that scented it at Prospect Park; the leaves showered them with shade and sun, as they drove along.  “If it were not for the children here,” she said, “I should think that our first drive on Goat Island had never ended.”