her. "There doesn't seem to be very much
in it."

"That's it! Don't you think I had a right to there being something in
it, after all I did for her?"

"I always hoped you hadn't done anything for her, but if you have, why
should she give herself away on paper? It's a very proper letter."

"It's a little too proper, and it's the last I shall have to do with
her. She knew that I should be on pins and needles till I heard how her
father had taken Burnamy's being there, that night, and she doesn't say
a word about it."

"The general may have had a tantrum that she couldn't describe. Perhaps
she hasn't told him, yet."

"She would tell him instantly!" cried Mrs. March who began to find
reason in the supposition, as well as comfort for the hurt which the
girl's reticence had given her. "Or if she wouldn't, it would be because
she was waiting for the best chance."

"That would be like the wise daughter of a difficult father. She may be
waiting for the best chance to say how he took it. No, I'm all for Miss
Triscoe, and I hope that now, if she's taken herself off our hands,
she'll keep off."

"It's altogether likely that he's made her promise not to tell me
anything about it," Mrs. March mused aloud.

"That would be unjust to a person who had behaved so discreetly as you
have," said her husband.

They were on their way to Wurzburg, and at the first station, which was
a junction, a lady mounted to their compartment just before the train
began to move. She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been pretty,
but she bore herself with a kind of authority in spite of her thread
gloves, her dowdy gray travelling-dress, and a hat of lower middle-class
English tastelessness. She took the only seat vacant, a backward-riding
place beside a sleeping passenger who looked like a commercial
traveller, but she seemed ill at ease in it, and March offered her
his seat. She accepted it very promptly, and thanked him for it in the
English of a German, and Mrs. March now classed her as a governess who
had been teaching in England and had acquired the national feeling
for dress. But in this character she found her interesting, and even a
little pathetic, and she made her some overtures of talk which the
other met eagerly enough. They were now running among low hills, not so
picturesque as those between Eger and Nuremberg, but of much the same
toylike quaintness in the villages dropped here and there in their
valleys. One small town, co