trians so
amusing and the fascination of Paris so great, that they stayed out later
than usual and became aware that they should have to hurry home to arrive
in time for dinner. They hurried accordingly, arm-in-arm, good-humoured
and hungry, agreeing that there was nothing like Paris after all and that
after everything too that had come and gone they were not yet sated with
innocent pleasures. When they reached the hotel they found that, though
scandalously late, they were in time for all the dinner they were likely
to sit down to. Confusion reigned in the apartments of the Moreens--very
shabby ones this time, but the best in the house--and before the
interrupted service of the table, with objects displaced almost as if
there had been a scuffle and a great wine-stain from an overturned
bottle, Pemberton couldn't blink the fact that there had been a scene of
the last proprietary firmness. The storm had come--they were all seeking
refuge. The hatches were down, Paula and Amy were invisible--they had
never tried the most casual art upon Pemberton, but he felt they had
enough of an eye to him not to wish to meet him as young ladies whose
frocks had been confiscated--and Ulick appeared to have jumped overboard.
The host and his staff, in a word, had ceased to "go on" at the pace of
their guests, and the air of embarrassed detention, thanks to a pile of
gaping trunks in the passage, was strangely commingled with the air of
indignant withdrawal. When Morgan took all this in--and he took it in
very quickly--he coloured to the roots of his hair. He had walked from
his infancy among difficulties and dangers, but he had never seen a
public exposure. Pemberton noticed in a second glance at him that the
tears had rushed into his eyes and that they were tears of a new and
untasted bitterness. He wondered an instant, for the boy's sake, whether
he might successfully pretend not to understand. Not successfully, he
felt, as Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, dinnerless by their extinguished hearth,
rose before him in their little dishonoured salon, casting about with
glassy eyes for the nearest port in such a storm. They were not
prostrate but were horribly white, and Mrs. Moreen had evidently been
crying. Pemberton quickly learned however that her grief was not for the
loss of her dinner, much as she usually enjoyed it, but the fruit of a
blow that struck even deeper, as she made all haste to explain. He would
see for himself, so far as t