ked Wayne, suddenly.

Mr. Lanley looked at him as if he hadn't heard, and frowned.

"I don't know what you mean," he said.

"Don't you think there's a look of my mother about it?"

"No," said Mr. Lanley, rather loudly, and then added, "Well, I see what
you mean, though I shouldn't--" He stopped and turning to them with some
sternness, he asked them how they accounted for their presence in the
museum at such an hour and alone.

There was nothing to do but to tell him the truth. And when Wayne had
finished, Mathilde was surprised at her grandfather's question. She
thought he would ask what her mother thought of it. If they had been
alone, she would have told him that Adelaide thought Wayne a commonplace
young man with stubby hands; but as it was, she had resolved to put her
mother's opposition on a more dignified plane. Only Mr. Lanley did not
ask the question of her. It was to Wayne he was speaking, when he said:

"What does your mother think of it?"

"Oh, my mother," answered Pete. "Well, she thinks that if she were a girl
she'd like to go to China."

Mr. Lanley looked up, and they both smiled with the most perfect
understanding.

"She would," said the older man, and then he became intensely serious.
"It's quite out of the question," he said.

"O Grandfather," Mathilde exclaimed, clasping her hands about his
arm, "don't talk like that! It wouldn't be possible for me to let him
go without me. O Grandfather, can't you remember what it was like to
be in love?"

A complete silence followed this little speech--a silence that went on
and on and seemed to be stronger than human power. Perhaps for the first
time in his life Lanley felt hostile toward the girl beside him. "Oh,
dear," Mathilde was thinking, "I suppose I've made him remember my
grandmother and his youth!" "Can love be remembered," Pete was saying to
himself, "or is it like a perfume that can be recognized, but not
recalled?"

Lanley turned at last to Wayne.

"It's out of the question," he said, "that you should take this child to
China at two weeks' notice. You must see that."

"I see perfectly that many people will think it so. But you must see that
to us it is the inevitable thing to do."

"If every one else agreed, I should oppose it."

"O Grandfather!" wailed Mathilde. "And you were our great hope--you and
Mrs. Wayne!"

"In a matter like this I shall stand by your mother, Mathilde," he said,
and Mathilde imagined he meant as opposed to he