CHAPTER III.
THE COUSINS Dinner was over at the Windsor, in Montreal, and Mrs.Keith was sitting with Mrs.Ashborne in the square between the hotel and St.Catharine's Street.

A cool air blew uphill from the river, and the patch of grass with its fringe of small, dusty trees had a certain picturesqueness in the twilight.

Above it the wooded crest of the mountain rose darkly against the evening sky; lights glittered behind the network of thin branches and fluttering leaves along the sidewalk, and the dome of the cathedral bulked huge and shadowy across the square.

Downhill, toward St.James's, rose towering buildings, with the rough-hewn front of the Canadian Pacific station prominent among them, and the air was filled with the clanging of street-cars and the tolling of locomotive bells.
Once or twice, however, when the throb of the traffic momentarily subsided, music rose faint and sweet from the cathedral, and Mrs.Keith turned to listen.

She had heard the uplifted voices before, through her open window in the early morning when the city was silent and its busy toilers slept, and now it seemed to her appropriate that they could not be wholly drowned by its hoarse commercial clamor.
The square served as a cool retreat for the inhabitants of crowded tenements and those who had nowhere else to go, but Margaret Keith was not fastidious about her company.