Chapter IX.

"Any bar, any cross, any impediment will be medicinable to me: I am sick in
displeasure to him; and whatsoever comes athwart his affection, ranges evenly
with mine. How canst thou cross this marriage?"
-- _Much ado about nothing._

A few days after the conversation detailed in the
preceding chapter, there was ushered into the office
of the advocate at Montreal a gentleman, who an-
nounced himself as Montigny, Seigneur of Mainville.
He was tall, and of a distinguished aspect, and had
scarcely accepted of the advocate's invitation to be
seated, when, like a man impatient to be done with
a disagreeable business, he began:

"I have a son, sir, and you, as I believe, a ward,
an orphan girl;" pronouncing with a mixture of pity
and contempt the last two words.

The advocate observed this depreciatory intonation,
and throwing himself backwards in his large easy
chair, repeated: "An orphan girl," at the same time
putting a half angry, half comical expression into his
countenance, and perpetrating a pun in what followed:
"Yes, many of your Canadian noblesse would bless
themselves to have been her father. The poor fellow,
it is well he is not here to have overheard you. An
orphan girl: true, as you say, I have an orphan girl, --
or one that passes for such; a girl I love, a ward, a
charming child, yonder at Stillyside. Were I dis-
posed to praise her I might say she is the Mountain's
maid; the Dryad of its woods, a grace, a goddess,

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