e cried as we went, and with an
extravagance, as I felt, of sincerity. At the same moment two ladies,
apparently English, came toward us--scattered groups had been sitting
there and the inmates of the hotel were moving to and fro--and I
observed the immediate charming transition, the fruit of such years
of social practice, by which, as they greeted us, her tension and her
impatience dropped to recognition and pleasure. They stopped to speak
to her and she enquired with sweet propriety as to the "continued
improvement" of their sister. I strolled on and she presently rejoined
me; after which she had a peremptory note. "Come away from this--come
down into the garden." We descended to that blander scene, strolled
through it and paused on the border of the lake.

V

The charm of the evening had deepened, the stillness was like a solemn
expression on a beautiful face and the whole air of the place divine.
In the fading light my nephew's boat was too far out to be perceived.
I looked for it a little and then, as I gave it up, remarked that from
such an excursion as that, on such a lake and at such an hour, a young
man and a young woman of common sensibility could only come back doubly
pledged to each other.

To this observation Mrs. Pallant's answer was, superficially at least,
irrelevant; she said after a pause: "With you, my dear man, one has
certainly to dot one's 'i's.' Haven't you discovered, and didn't I tell
you at Homburg, that we're miserably poor?"

"Isn't 'miserably' rather too much--living as you are at an expensive
hotel?"

Well, she promptly met this. "They take us en pension, for ever so
little a day. I've been knocking about Europe long enough to learn all
sorts of horrid arts. Besides, don't speak of hotels; we've spent half
our life in them and Linda told me only last night that she hoped never
to put her foot into one again. She feels that when she comes to such a
place as this she ought, if things were decently right, to find a villa
of her own."

"Then her companion there's perfectly competent to give her one. Don't
think I've the least desire to push them into each other's arms--I only
ask to wash my hands of them. But I should like to know why you want, as
you said just now, to save him. When you speak as if your daughter were
a monster I take it you're not serious."

She was facing me in the rich short twilight, and to describe herself as
immeasurably more serious perhaps than she had ev