h a burst of feeling which surprised him.
"I want to go home!"

They had been talking over their day, and planning their journey to
Holland for the morrow, when it came to this outburst from her in the
last half-hour before bed which they sat prolonging beside their stove.

"What! And not go to Holland? What is to become of my after-cure?"

"Oh, it's too late for that, now. We've used up the month running about,
and tiring ourselves to death. I should like to rest a week--to get into
my berth on the Norumbia and rest!"

"I guess the September gales would have something to say about that."

"I would risk the September gales."

LXXII.

In the morning March came home from his bankers gay with the day's
provisional sunshine in his heart, and joyously expectant of his wife's
pleasure in the letters he was bringing. There was one from each of
their children, and there was one from Fulkerson, which March opened and
read on the street, so as to intercept any unpleasant news there might
be in them; there were two letters for Mrs. March which he knew without
opening were from Miss Triscoe and Mrs. Adding respectively; Mrs.
Adding's, from the postmarks, seemed to have been following them about
for some time.

"They're all right at home," he said. "Do see what those people have
been doing."

"I believe," she said, taking a knife from the breakfast tray beside her
bed to cut the envelopes, "that you've really cared more about them all
along than I have."

"No, I've only been anxious to be done with them."

She got the letters open, and holding one of them up in each hand she
read them impartially and simultaneously; then she flung them both down,
and turned her face into her pillow with an impulse of her inalienable
girlishness. "Well, it is too silly."

March felt authorized to take them up and read them consecutively; when
he had done, so he did not differ from his wife. In one case, Agatha
had written to her dear Mrs. March that she and Burnamy had just that
evening become engaged; Mrs. Adding, on her part owned a farther step,
and announced her marriage to Mr. Kenby. Following immemorial usage in
such matters Kenby had added a postscript affirming his happiness in
unsparing terms, and in Agatha's letter there was an avowal of like
effect from Burnamy. Agatha hinted her belief that her father would soon
come to regard Burnamy as she did; and Mrs. Adding professed a certain
humiliation in having realized that,