don't agree with you in the least, Susie," declared Nidia. "I
think unnecessary racket ought to be put down with a stern hand. Don't
you remember all that abominable cannon nuisance when we were in the
Bernese Oberland? You didn't like that any more than I did. Just
fancy, Mr Ames. Some of the most picturesque turnings of the road,
almost wherever we went, were tenanted by a miscreant volunteering to
let off a horrid cannon for half a franc--to raise an echo."

"I should have felt like offering him a whole one not to raise it," was
the reply. "But the noble Switzer was shrewd enough to appraise his
clients at their correct value. The English are never quite happy
unless they are making a noise, unless it is when they are listening to
one."

"Yes; aren't they?" cried Nidia. "You see it in their fondness for
banging doors and talking at the top of their voices on every landing at
all hours of the day and night, and throwing their boots about and
pounding up and down for hours over somebody else's head, in a house
full of other people."

The silent one hearkened approvingly. "That's no fool of a girl," he
was saying to himself.

"I know," replied John Ames. "And, talking about that stumping overhead
trick, if you were wantonly to knock a cripple off his crutch you would
be voted the greatest brute on earth. Yet that same cripple will go
into the room above yours, and, as you say, pound up and down for hours,
or perhaps let fall that same crutch with a mighty bang upon the floor,
totally callous to the possibility of there being some unfortunate wight
underneath with shattered nerves, and generally seedy, and who would
give his soul for a square night's rest. No; if you expect from other
people any of the consideration they expect from you, you are simply
laughed at for a fool, and a selfish one at that."

"Oh, well, in life we have to give and take, I suppose," remarked the
censorious one, with striking originality.

John Ames smiled. He had an idea as to the sort of giving and taking
this masterful person would be likely to practise, save in one quarter,
that is; for he had not spent the time he had in the society of the two
without detecting that she had at any rate one soft place, and that was
Nidia Commerell. So he agreed easily, and the talk drifted on to other
matters.

It was pleasant out in the moonlight. The elder of the two ladies had
pronounced herself tired when Nidia, whose freshness not