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Each time we met her greeting was of the warmest, and had in it the recollection of those earlier days. That, I said to myself, was the real Carette. And then there would gradually come upon us that thin veil of distance, as though the years and the growth and the experiences of life were setting us a little apart. And that, I said, was the Miss Maugers.
The lower boundary of the township began near the foot of Maugers' Island, about two miles above the Queens-Sunbury county line. The lots are numbered beginning at Middle Island and running down the river to No. 39, then starting again at the upper end of the grant, at the York county line, and running down the river to Middle Island, so that the last lot, No. 100, adjoins the first lot.
And Aunt Jeanne loved her dearly and knew what was best for her, and so she insisted, and Carette went weeping to Peter Port to the Miss Maugers' school in George Road. Her going made a great gap in my life, and the outer things began to call on me. My ideas respecting them were dim and distorted enough, as I afterwards found, but their call was all the more insistent for that.
The effect of the Miss Maugers' teaching on Carette herself had been to lift her above her old companions, and indeed above her apparent station in life, though on that point my ideas had no solid standing ground.
The merry dark eyes with their deepening depths; the sweet wide mouth that flashed so readily into laughter, and set one thinking of the glad little waves and little white shells on Herm beach; the mane of dark brown hair she wore it primly braided at the Miss Maugers' in which gleams of sunshine seemed to have become entangled and never been able to find their way out, these went with me through the soft seductions of the Antilles, and the more experienced beguilements of the Mediterranean, and armed me sufficiently against them all; these also that filled with rosy light many a long hour that for my comrades was dark and tedious, and kept my heart high and strong when the times were hard and bitter.
Twice I stormed the maiden fortress in George Road, and ran the gauntlet of the Miss Maugers with less discomfiture than on the first occasion, through Miss Maddy's sympathy and my added weight of years and experience. And once Carette was making holiday with Aunt Jeanne, and Beaumanoir saw more of me than did Belfontaine.
Could she be blind to his black humours, which, to me, were more visible even than his good looks? From what Aunt Jeanne had said, he was by way of being very well off. And perhaps the results of the Miss Maugers' teachings would incline a girl to consider such things. I thought they probably would.
And once and again Carette fell on earlier times still, and we were boy and girl together under the Autelets and Tintageu, or swimming in Havre Gosselin, and trembling through the Gouliot caves behind Krok's tapping stick. And we talked of Aunt Jeanne's party, and our Riding Day, and Black Boy, and Gray Robin. And she told me much of the Miss Maugers, and their school, and her school-fellows.
It was probably the blue line of coast on the horizon which set us to that, and perhaps something of a desire on my part to show her that, if she had been learning things at the Miss Maugers, I also had been learning in the greater world outside. It was very different from the talk that usually passes between riders on Riding Day.
The surer sign was in the man himself, and much pondering of the matter led me to think that Jean Le Marchant might well be something more than simply the successful smuggler he seemed, and that Carette's dainty lady ways might well be the result of natural growth and not simply of the Miss Maugers' polishing. I would not have had it otherwise.
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