on his own independent train of thought; and he sat listening
to her simple chronicle of swimming, sailing and riding, varied by an
occasional dance at the primitive inn when a man-of-war came in. A few
pleasant people from Philadelphia and Baltimore were picknicking at the
inn, and the Selfridge Merrys had come down for three weeks because
Kate Merry had had bronchitis. They were planning to lay out a lawn
tennis court on the sands; but no one but Kate and May had racquets,
and most of the people had not even heard of the game.

All this kept her very busy, and she had not had time to do more than
look at the little vellum book that Archer had sent her the week before
(the "Sonnets from the Portuguese"); but she was learning by heart "How
they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," because it was one of
the first things he had ever read to her; and it amused her to be able
to tell him that Kate Merry had never even heard of a poet called
Robert Browning.

Presently she started up, exclaiming that they would be late for
breakfast; and they hurried back to the tumble-down house with its
pointless porch and unpruned hedge of plumbago and pink geraniums where
the Wellands were installed for the winter. Mr. Welland's sensitive
domesticity shrank from the discomforts of the slovenly southern hotel,
and at immense expense, and in face of almost insuperable difficulties,
Mrs. Welland was obliged, year after year, to improvise an
establishment partly made up of discontented New York servants and
partly drawn from the local African supply.

"The doctors want my husband to feel that he is in his own home;
otherwise he would be so wretched that the climate would not do him any
good," she explained, winter after winter, to the sympathising
Philadelphians and Baltimoreans; and Mr. Welland, beaming across a
breakfast table miraculously supplied with the most varied delicacies,
was presently saying to Archer: "You see, my dear fellow, we camp--we
literally camp. I tell my wife and May that I want to teach them how
to rough it."

Mr. and Mrs. Welland had been as much surprised as their daughter by
the young man's sudden arrival; but it had occurred to him to explain
that he had felt himself on the verge of a nasty cold, and this seemed
to Mr. Welland an all-sufficient reason for abandoning any duty.

"You can't be too careful, especially toward spring," he said, heaping
his plate with straw-coloured griddle-cakes and drowni