The younger woman was talkative. She took them into her neat bedroom, with its floor in two colors,--a yellow geometrical design painted on a brown ground,--and showed them with especial pride her dressing-table, the frame of which she had fashioned with her own hands and draped with white muslin. From the window she pointed out her little garden, with its vegetable patch and tiny strawberry-bed, which she worked herself. "I sell some every year," she said. "That helps keep house. We don't need much, we Acadians; we very lazy." "You don't seem lazy to me," remarked Amy; "certainly you are hard-working." "P'raps lazy is not the word--no, it is content. We Acadians are too content with what we have. We want not too much, and so we make not money as the Americans." With some difficulty Amy brought to a close the visit to the cheerful mother and daughter. She on her part, and they on theirs, had so many questions to ask and to answer. On their way back to the hotel they stopped for a moment at the graveyard in front of the great brick church. "Let us not go in," urged Priscilla. "It may not be open," returned Amy, "though this Stella Maris interests me because our landlady told me that the whole parish helped build it. All saved and saved, and gave what they could, and the men, when they came home tired from fishing, would go some distance where the bricks were and haul them to the building. But if you don't care to go into the church, do spend a few minutes in the churchyard,--I have a weakness for studying old gravestones;" and as she spoke Amy's mind went back to a day long ago when she and Brenda and Nora and Julia had poked among the stones in that old burying-ground overlooking Marblehead Harbor. This thought reminded her of Fritz, who had teased her that day in his boyish way, and strangely enough these memories took such possession of her that she could not put her mind on this little churchyard of the Acadians. Moreover there was less of interest here than she had expected. Inscriptions were few, and these were modern and practical. There was something pathetic in the general tangle of grass and shrubbery, and in the plain little wooden crosses that marked the majority of the graves. As they approached the hotel a shout greeted them,--"Amy, Amy, Prissie, Prissie! Where have you been?" "How silly Martine is!" Priscilla had barely time to say, when Martine herself rushed out of a little building near the house. "Oh, do come in, Yvonne is with me; I've been buying her a hat." "A hat!" "Yes, do come and see. There's a man here from Halifax,--a drummer, I suppose,--and he has the loveliest fall styles. I would get one for myself if I knew how to carry it." "An autumn hat in July! Will you make poor Yvonne wear it now?"