a fitting time to find out from
Boyne what she honestly could about the relation of the Rasmiths to Mr.
Breckon. It was very little beyond their supposition, which every one
else had shared, that he was going to land with them at Boulogne, and
he must have changed his mind very suddenly. Boyne had not heard the
Rasmiths speak of it. Miss Rasmith never spoke of Mr. Breckon at all;
but she seemed to want to talk of Ellen; she was always asking about
her, and what was the matter with her, and how long she had been sick.

"Boyne," said his mother, with a pang, "you didn't tell her anything
about Ellen?"

"Momma!" said the boy, in such evident abhorrence of the idea that she
rested tranquil concerning it. She paid little attention to what Boyne
told her otherwise of the Rasmiths. Her own horizon were so limited that
she could not have brought home to herself within them that wandering
life the Rasmiths led from climate to climate and sensation to
sensation, with no stay so long as the annually made in New York, where
they sometimes passed months enough to establish themselves in giving
and taking tea in a circle of kindred nomads. She conjectured as
ignorantly as Boyne himself that they were very rich, and it would
not have enlightened her to know that the mother was the widow of a
California politician, whom she had married in the sort of middle period
following upon her less mortuary survival of Miss Rasmith's father,
whose name was not Rasmith.

What Mrs. Kenton divined was that they had wanted to get Breckon, and
that so far as concerned her own interest in him they had wanted to
get him away from Ellen. In her innermost self-confidences she did not
permit herself the notion that Ellen had any right to him; but still it
was a relief to have them off the ship, and to have him left. Of all
the witnesses of the fact, she alone did not find it awkward. Breckon
himself found it very awkward. He did not wish to be with the
Rasmiths, but he found it uncomfortable not being with them, under
the circumstances, and he followed them ashore in tingling reveries of
explanation and apology. He had certainly meant to get off at Boulogne,
and when he had suddenly and tardily made up his mind to keep on to
Rotterdam, he had meant to tell them as soon as he had the labels on his
baggage changed. He had not meant to tell them why he had changed his
mind, and he did not tell them now in these tingling reveries. He did
not own the reason