“What can _you_ do for her? You, hiding for your life, the ruined upholder of a lost cause! Here she is safe, protected, wealth and security before her. And with you?” “_Life_, I think!” said I, rising too, and stretching out my arms. “But listen, father,” I went on more lightly. “I am not so helpless. I have some little _rentes_ in Montreal, you know. And moreover, I am not planning to carry her off to-night. By no means anything so finely irregular. I am not ready. Only, see her I will before I go. If you will not help me, I will stay about this place, about your house indeed, till I meet her. That is all. If you dote upon my going, you know the way to speed me.” His kind, round face puckered anxiously. But he hit upon a compromise. “I will have no hand in it,” said he. “But if you are resolved to stay, you may as well find her without loss of time. The house we occupy is crowded, and she affects a solitary mood. She walks over the hill and down this way, of an evening, to visit some unhappy ones along by the river. You may see her, perhaps, to-night.” I grasped his hand and kissed it, but he drew it away, vexed at himself. “We will talk of other things now,” I said softly. “But do not be angry if I say I love you, father.” He smiled with an air of reproach; and thereafter talk we did through hours, save for a little time when he was absent fetching me a meal. All that Grûl had told me of the ruin of the French cause he told me in another colour, and more besides of the doom of the Acadians—but upon Yvonne’s name we touched no more by so much as the lightest breath. At my cousin Marc’s rashness in going to the chapel he glanced with some severity, grieving for the sorrow of the young wife at Quebec. But for the English he had many good words—they were pitiful, he said, in the act of carrying out cruel orders. And they neither robbed nor terrorized. Not they, said he, but a wicked priest and the intriguers of a rotten government at Quebec, were the scourge of Acadie. When the sun got low over the Gaspereau Ridge he called to mind some duties too long forgotten, and bade me farewell with a loving wistfulness. I think, however, it was the imminent coming of Yvonne that drove him away. He feared lest he should meet her, and in seeming to know of my purpose seem to sanction it. I could not help believing in my heart that in this matter, perhaps for the first time in his priesthood, the kind curé’s conscience was a little tremulous in its admonitions. I watched him out of sight; and then, posting myself in a coign of vantage behind a great willow that overhung the stream, I waited with a thumping heart, and with a misgiving that all other organs within my frame had slumped away to nothing but a meagre and contemptible jelly. Chapter XXIV “If You Love Me, Leave Me”