him in his hour of need; but if it had been a flow of intelligible
expostulation, it would have had no effect upon the disputants. They
grew more outrageous, till the manager himself, appeared at the head of
the stairs, and extended an arresting hand over the hubbub. As soon as
the situation clarified itself he hurried down to his visitors with a
polite roar of apology and rescued them from the gendarme, and led
them up to his room and forced them into arm-chairs with a rapidity of
reparation which did not exhaust itself till he had entreated them with
every circumstance of civility to excuse an incident so mortifying to
him. But with all his haste he lost so much time in this that he had
little left to show them through the theatre, and their presentation to
the prima donna was reduced to the obeisances with which they met and
parted as she went upon the stage at the lifting of the curtain. In
the lack of a common language this was perhaps as well as a longer
interview; and nothing could have been more honorable than their
dismissal at the hands of the gendarme who had received them so
stormily. He opened the door for them, and stood with his fingers to his
cap saluting, in the effect of being a whole file of grenadiers.

XLIII.

At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of the box where he had
been sitting with the ladies during the absence of the gentlemen. He had
knocked at the door almost as soon as they disappeared, and if he did
not fully share the consternation which his presence caused, he looked
so frightened that Mrs. March reserved the censure which the sight of
him inspired, and in default of other inspiration treated his coming
simply as a surprise. She shook hands with him, and then she asked him
to sit down, and listened to his explanation that he had come back to
Carlsbad to write up the birthnight festivities, on an order from the
Paris-New York Chronicle; that he had seen them in the box and had
ventured to took in. He was pale, and so discomposed that the heart of
justice was softened more and more in Mrs. March's breast, and she left
him to the talk that sprang up, by an admirable effect of tact in the
young lady, between him and Miss Triscoe.

After all, she decided, there was nothing criminal in his being in
Carlsbad, and possibly in the last analysis there was nothing so very
wicked in his being in her box. One might say that it was not very nice
of him after he had gone away under suc