"You and he are old friends?"

"Since our student days. I was of course at the French College--and he
at McGill. But we saw a great deal of each other. He used to come home
with me in his holidays."

"He told me something of his early life."

"Did he? It is a sad history, and I fear we--my family, that is, who are
so attached to him--have only made it sadder. Three years ago he was
engaged to my sister. Then the Archbishop forbade mixed marriages. My
sister broke it off, and now she is a nun in the Ursuline Convent
at Quebec."

"Oh, poor things!" cried Elizabeth, her eye on Anderson's distant face.

"My sister is quite happy," said Mariette sharply. "She did her duty.
But my poor friend suffered. However, now he has got over it. And I hope
he will marry. He is very dear to me, though we have not a single
opinion in the world in common."

Elizabeth kept him talking. The picture of Anderson drawn for her by the
admiring but always critical affection of his friend, touched and
stirred her. His influence at college, the efforts by which he had
placed his brothers in the world, the sensitive and generous temperament
which had won him friends among the French Canadian students, he
remaining all the time English of the English; the tendency to
melancholy--a personal and private melancholy--which mingled in him with
a passionate enthusiasm for Canada, and Canada's future; Mariette drew
these things for her, in a stately yet pungent French that affected her