at
it will begin again."

"Yes," said his wife, "now we can have each other all to ourselves."

"Yes. It's been very different from our first wedding journey in that. It
isn't that we're not so young now as we were, but that we don't seem so
much our own property. We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we
seem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come in
and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk. The disadvantage of living
along is that we get too much into the hands of other people."

"Yes, it is. I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too."

"I don't know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we had
died young--or younger," he suggested.

"No, I don't know that it is," she assented. She added, from an absence
where he was sufficiently able to locate her meaning, "I hope she'll
write and tell me what her father says and does when she tells him that
he was there."

There were many things, in the weather, the landscape, their sole
occupancy of an unsmoking compartment, while all the smoking compartments
round overflowed with smokers, which conspired to offer them a pleasing
illusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect that they almost held
each other's hands. In later life there are such moments when the
youthful emotions come back, as certain birds do in winter, and the
elderly heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it were young. But it
is best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs. March joined her husband in
mocking it, when he made her observe how fit it was that their silver
wedding journey should be resumed as part of his after-cure. If he had
found the fountain of youth in the warm, flat, faintly nauseous water of
the Felsenquelle, he was not going to call himself twenty-eight again
till his second month of the Carlsbad regimen was out, and he had got
back to salad and fruit.

At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it that
they could form a life-long friendship for the old English-speaking
waiter who served them, and would not suffer them to hurry themselves.
The hills had already fallen away, and they ran along through a cheerful
country, with tracts of forest under white clouds blowing about in a blue
sky, and gayly flinging their shadows down upon the brown ploughed land,
and upon the yellow oat-fields, where women were cutting the leisurely
harvest with sickles, and where once a great girl with swarthy bare arms
unbent herself f