d plans for taking up
after they were settled in Schevleningen. The boy scoffed at the notion
that he was not perfectly well, and he wished to talk with March on the
points where he had found Kenby wanting.

"Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me, Rose," the editor
protested, and he amplified his ignorance for the boy's good to an
extent which Rose saw was a joke. He left Holland to talk about other
things which his mother thought quite as bad for him. He wished to know
if March did not think that the statue of the bishop with the sparrow on
its finger was a subject for a poem; and March said gayly that if Rose
would write it he would print it in 'Every Other Week'.

The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter. "No, I couldn't do it. But
I wish Mr. Burnamy had seen it. He could. Will you tell him about it?"
He wanted to know if March had heard from Burnamy lately, and in the
midst of his vivid interest he gave a weary sigh.

His mother said that now he had talked enough, and bade him say good-by
to the Marches, who were coming so soon to Holland, anyway. Mrs. March
put her arms round him to kiss him, and when she let him sink back her
eyes were dim.

"You see how frail he is?" said Mrs. Adding. "I shall not let him out of
my sight, after this, till he's well again."

She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby away with them which was
not lost upon the witnesses. He asked them to come into the reading-room
a moment with him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were going to make
some excuse to her for himself; but he said: "I don't know how we're to
manage about the Triscoes. The general will have a room to himself, but
if Mrs. Adding takes Rose in with her, it leaves Miss Triscoe out, and
there isn't a room to be had in this house for love or money. Do you
think," he appealed directly to Mrs. March, "that it would do to offer
her my room at the Swan?"

"Why, yes," she assented, with a reluctance rather for the complicity
in which he had already involved her, and for which he was still
unpunished, than for what he was now proposing. "Or she could come in
with me, and Mr. March could take it."

"Whichever you think," said Kenby so submissively that she relented, to
ask:

"And what will you do?"

He laughed. "Well, people have been known to sleep in a chair. I shall
manage somehow."

"You might offer to go in with the general," March suggested, and the
men apparently thought this was a joke. Mrs. March did no