“And do we?”

“No,” came the answer, somewhat ruefully.  “Perhaps, Basil,” she added, “we’ve been a little too successful in disguising our bridal character.  Do you know,” she continued, looking him anxiously in the face, “this Miss Ellison took me at first for—­your sister!”

Basil broke forth in outrageous laughter.  “One more such victory,” he said, “and we are undone;” and he laughed again, immoderately.  “How sad is the fruition of human wishes!  There ’s nothing, after all, like a good thorough failure for making people happy.”

Isabel did not listen to him.  Safe in a dim corner of the deserted saloon, she seized him in a vindictive embrace; then, as if it had been he who suggested the idea of such a loathsome relation, hissed out the hated words, “Your sister!” and released him with a disdainful repulse.

A little after daybreak the steamer stopped at the Canadian city of Kingston, a handsome place, substantial to the water’s edge, and giving a sense of English solidity by the stone of which it is largely built.  There was an accession of many passengers here, and they and the people on the wharf were as little like Americans as possible.  They were English or Irish or Scotch, with the healthful bloom of the Old World still upon their faces, or if Canadians they looked not less hearty; so that one must wonder if the line between the Dominion and the United States did not also sharply separate good digestion and dyspepsia.  These provincials had not our regularity of features, nor the best of them our careworn sensibility of expression; but neither had they our complexions of adobe; and even Isabel was forced to allow that the men were, on the whole, better dressed than the same number of average Americans would have been in a city of that size and remoteness.  The stevedores who were putting the freight aboard were men of leisure; they joked in a kindly way with the orange-women and the old women picking up chips on the pier; and our land of hurry seemed beyond the ocean rather than beyond the lake.

Kingston has romantic memories of being Fort Frontenac two hundred years ago; of Count Frontenac’s splendid advent among the Indians; of the brave La Salle, who turned its wooden walls to stone; of wars with the savages and then with the New York colonists, whom the French and their allies harried from this point; of the destruction of La Salle’s fort in the Old French War; and of final surrender a few years later to the English.  It is as picturesque as it is historical.  All about the city, the shores are beautifully wooded, and there are many lovely islands,—­the first indeed of those Thousand Islands with which the head of the St. Lawrence is filled, and among which the steamer was presently threading her way.  They are still as charming and still almost as wild as when, in 1673, Frontenac’s flotilla of canoes passed through their labyrinth and issued upon the lake.  Save for a light-house