y rate. She wondered that Basil could laugh at it; and he
would make her hate him if he kept on.

From the seat behind their own they were now made listeners to the
history of a ten weeks' typhoid fever, from the moment when the narrator
noticed that he had not felt very well for a day or two back, and all
at once a kind of shiver took him, till he lay fourteen days perfectly
insensible, and could eat nothing but a little pounded ice--and his
wife--a small woman, too--used to lift him back and forth between the
bed and sofa like a feather, and the neighbors did not know half the
time whether he was dead or alive. This history, from which not the
smallest particular or the least significant symptom of the case was
omitted, occupied an hour in recital, and was told, as it seemed, for
the entertainment of one who had been five minutes before it began a
stranger to the historian.

At last the train came to a stand, and Isabel wailed forth in accents of
desperation the words, "O, disgusting!" The monotony of the narrative in
the seat behind, fatally combining with the heat of the day, had lulled
her into slumbers from which she awoke at the stopping of the train, to
find her head resting tenderly upon her husband's shoulder.

She confronted his merriment with eyes of mournful rebuke; but as she
could not find him, or the harshest construction, in the least to blame,
she was silent.

"Never mind, dear, never mind," he coaxed, "you were really not
responsible. It was fatigue, destiny, the spite of fortune,--whatever
you like. In the case of the others, whom you despise so justly, I dare
say it is sheer, disgraceful affection. But see that ravishing placard,
swinging from the roof: 'This train stops twenty minutes for dinner
at Utica.' In a few minutes more we shall be at Utica. If they have
anything edible there, it shall never contract my powers. I could dine
at the Albany station, even."

In a little while they found themselves in an airy, comfortable
dining-room, eating a dinner, which it seemed to them France in the
flush of her prosperity need not have blushed to serve; for if it wanted
a little in the last graces of art, it redeemed itself in abundance,
variety, and wholesomeness. At the elbow of every famishing passenger
stood a beneficent coal-black glossy fairy, in a white linen apron and
jacket, serving him with that alacrity and kindliness and grace which
make the negro waiter the master, not the slave of his c