dge, "do you think he is like
Bittridge?"

"He's made me think of him all the time."

"It's curious," the judge mused. "I have always noticed how our faults
repeat themselves, but I didn't suppose our fates would always take the
same shape, or something like it." Mrs. Kenton stared at him. "When this
other one first made up to us on the boat my heart went down. I thought
of Bittridge so."

"Mr. Breckon?"

"Yes, the same lightness; the same sort of trifling--Didn't you notice
it?"

"No--yes, I noticed it. But I wasn't afraid for an instant. I saw that
he was good."

"Oh!"

"What I'm afraid of now is that Ellen doesn't care anything about him."

"He isn't wicked enough?"

"I don't say that. But it would be too much happiness to expect in one
short life."

The judge could not deny the reasonableness of her position. He could
only oppose it. "Well, I don't think we've had any more than our share
of happiness lately."

No one except Boyne could have made Trannel's behavior a cause of
quarrel, but the other Kentons made it a cause of coldness which was
quite as effective. In Lottie this took the form of something so active,
so positive, that it was something more than a mere absence of warmth.
Before she came clown to breakfast the next morning she studied a stare
in her mirror, and practised it upon Trannel so successfully when he
came up to speak to her that it must have made him doubt whether he had
ever had her acquaintance. In his doubt he ventured to address her,
and then Lottie turned her back upon him in a manner that was perfectly
convincing. He attempted a smiling ease with Mrs. Kenton and the judge,
but they shared neither his smile nor his ease, and his jocose questions
about the end of yesterday's adventures, which he had not been privy to,
did not seem to appeal to the American sense of humor in them. Ellen was
not with them, nor Boyne, but Trannel was not asked to take either of
the vacant places at the table, even when Breckon took one of them,
after a decent exchange of civilities with him. He could only saunter
away and leave Mrs. Kenton to a little pang.

"Tchk!" she made. "I'm sorry for him!"

"So am I," said the judge. "But he will get over it--only too soon, I'm
afraid. I don't believe he's very sorry for himself."

They had not advised with Breckon, and he did not feel authorized to
make any comment. He seemed preoccupied, to Mrs. Kenton's eye, when she
turned it upon him from Tranne