m about London under valid
protection--such a mixture of freedom and safety--and that perhaps she
had been unjust, ungenerous to her sister. A good-natured, positively
charitable doubt came into her mind--a doubt that Selina might have the
benefit of. What she liked in her present undertaking was the element of
the _imprevu_ that it contained, and perhaps it was simply the same
happy sense of getting the laws of London--once in a way--off her back
that had led Selina to go over to Paris to ramble about with Captain
Crispin. Possibly they had done nothing worse than go together to the
Invalides and Notre Dame; and if any one were to meet _her_ driving that
way, so far from home, with Mr. Wendover--Laura, mentally, did not
finish her sentence, overtaken as she was by the reflection that she had
fallen again into her old assumption (she had been in and out of it a
hundred times), that Mrs. Berrington _had_ met Captain Crispin--the idea
she so passionately repudiated. She at least would never deny that she
had spent the afternoon with Mr. Wendover: she would simply say that he
was an American and had brought a letter of introduction.

The cab stopped at the Soane Museum, which Laura Wing had always wanted
to see, a compatriot having once told her that it was one of the most
curious things in London and one of the least known. While Mr. Wendover
was discharging the vehicle she looked over the important old-fashioned
square (which led her to say to herself that London was endlessly big
and one would never know all the places that made it up) and saw a great
bank of cloud hanging above it--a definite portent of a summer storm.
'We are going to have thunder; you had better keep the cab,' she said;
upon which her companion told the man to wait, so that they should not
afterwards, in the wet, have to walk for another conveyance. The
heterogeneous objects collected by the late Sir John Soane are arranged
in a fine old dwelling-house, and the place gives one the impression of
a sort of Saturday afternoon of one's youth--a long, rummaging visit,
under indulgent care, to some eccentric and rather alarming old
travelled person. Our young friends wandered from room to room and
thought everything queer and some few objects interesting; Mr. Wendover
said it would be a very good place to find a thing you couldn't find
anywhere else--it illustrated the prudent virtue of keeping. They took
note of the sarcophagi and pagodas, the artless old