romise to my sister that, with
my middle-aged habits, I should duck and dodge about Europe. So
I temporised. "Should you really object to the boy so much as a
son-in-law? After all he's a good fellow and a gentleman."

"My poor friend, you're incredibly superficial!" she made answer with an
assurance that struck me.

The contempt in it so nettled me in fact that I exclaimed: "Possibly!
But it seems odd that a lesson in consistency should come from YOU."

I had no retort from her on this, rather to my surprise, and when she
spoke again it was all quietly. "I think Linda and I had best withdraw.
We've been here a month--it will have served our purpose."

"Mercy on us, that will be a bore!" I protested; and for the rest of
the evening, till we separated--our conversation had taken place after
dinner at the Kursaal--she said little, preserving a subdued and almost
injured air. This somehow didn't appeal to me, since it was absurd that
Louisa Pallant, of all women, should propose to put me in the wrong. If
ever a woman had been in the wrong herself--! I had even no need to go
into that. Archie and I, at all events, usually attended the ladies back
to their own door--they lived in a street of minor accommodation at a
certain distance from the Rooms--where we parted for the night late,
on the big cobblestones, in the little sleeping German town, under
the closed windows of which, suggesting stuffy interiors, our cheerful
English partings resounded. On this occasion indeed they rather
languished; the question that had come up for me with Mrs. Pallant
appeared--and by no intention of mine--to have brushed the young couple
with its chill. Archie and Linda too struck me as conscious and dumb.

As I walked back to our hotel with my nephew I passed my hand into his
arm and put to him, by no roundabout approach, the question of whether
he were in serious peril of love.

"I don't know, I don't know--really, uncle, I don't know!" was, however,
all the satisfaction I could extract from the youth, who hadn't the
smallest vein of introspection. He mightn't know, but before we reached
the inn--we had a few more words on the subject--it seemed to me that
_I_ did. His mind wasn't formed to accommodate at one time many subjects
of thought, but Linda Pallant certainly constituted for the moment its
principal furniture. She pervaded his consciousness, she solicited
his curiosity, she associated herself, in a manner as yet informal and
und