your responsibilities to him, he cannot refuse
them, for the sake of his own child, and you are left with the sense
of having acted nobly and generously. I hope there are many men who
would do what I ask you to do, but I have not met many to whom I
could make such an appeal with any hope. But, after all, that is only
advice. I have no right to ask you to do anything like that. You asked
me for my opinion about it. Well, that is it. But I should not have
asked you to act on it."

"But I will," he said in a low voice; and then he went to the other
end of the room, for Mrs. Kavanagh was calling him to help her in
finding something she had lost.

Before he left that evening Mrs. Lorraine said to him, "We go by the
night-mail to Paris to-morrow night, and we shall dine here at five.
Would you have the courage to come up and join us in that melancholy
ceremony?"

"Oh yes," he said, "if I may go down to the station to see you away
afterward."

"I think if we got you so far we should persuade you to go with us,"
Mrs. Kavanagh said with a smile.

He sat silent for a minute. Of course she could not seriously mean
such a thing. But at all events she would not be displeased if he
crossed their path while they were actually abroad.

"It is getting too late in the year to go to Scotland now," he said
with some hesitation.

"Oh most certainly," Mrs. Lorraine said.

"I don't know where the man in whose yacht I was to have gone may be
now. I might spend half my holiday in trying to catch him."

"And during that time you would be alone," Mrs. Lorraine said.

"I suppose the Tyrol is a very nice place," he suggested.

"Oh most delightful," she exclaimed. "You know, we should go round by
Switzerland, and go up by Luzerne and Zurich to the end of the Lake
of Constance. Bregenz, mamma, isn't that the place where we hired that
good-natured man the year before last?"

"Yes, child."

"Now, you see, Mr. Ingram, if you had less time than we--if you
could not start with us to-morrow--you might come straight down by
Schaffhausen and the steamer, and catch us up there, and then mamma
would become your guide. I am sure we should have some pleasant days
together till you got tired of us, and then you could go off on a
walking-tour if you pleased. And then, you know, there would be no
difficulty about our meeting at Bregenz, for mamma and I have plenty
of time, and we should wait there for a few days, so as to make sure."

"Cecilia,"