ng; but he is the
sweetest child!"

"He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I'm sorry to
leave behind," March assented. "He's the only unmarried one that wasn't
in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some
rather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I'm
not sure that I should have been safe even from Rose. Carlsbad has been
an interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now
that it will begin again."

"Yes," said his wife, "now we can have each other all to ourselves."

"Yes. It's been very different from our first wedding journey in that.
It isn't that we're not so young now as we were, but that we don't seem
so much our own property. We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we
seem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come
in and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk. The disadvantage of
living along is that we get too much into the hands of other people."

"Yes, it is. I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too."

"I don't know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we had
died young--or younger," he suggested.

"No, I don't know that it is," she assented. She added, from an absence
where he was sufficiently able to locate her meaning, "I hope she'll
write and tell me what her father says and does when she tells him that
he was there."

There were many things, in the weather, the landscape, their
sole occupancy of an unsmoking compartment, while all the smoking
compartments round overflowed with smokers, which conspired to offer
them a pleasing illusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect
that they almost held each other's hands. In later life there are such
moments when the youthful emotions come back, as certain birds do in
winter, and the elderly heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it
were young. But it is best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs. March
joined her husband in mocking it, when he made her observe how fit it
was that their silver wedding journey should be resumed as part of his
after-cure. If he had found the fountain of youth in the warm, flat,
faintly nauseous water of the Felsenquelle, he was not going to call
himself twenty-eight again till his second month of the Carlsbad regimen
was out, and he had got back to salad and fruit.

At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it that
they could form a life-long friendship for the old Engli