ppose he offered himself,
and she--"

"What nonsense!" said Mrs. March, but she was not at peace. "It's her
father who's keeping her away from him."

"I shouldn't mind that. He's keeping her away from us, too." But at that
moment Miss Triscoe as if she had followed his return from afar, came
over to speak to his wife. She said they were going on to Dresden that
evening, and she was afraid they might have no chance to see each other
on the train or in Hamburg. March, at this advance, went to speak with
her father; he found him no more reconciled to Europe than America.

"They're Goths," he said of the Germans. "I could hardly get that stupid
brute in the telegraph-office to take my despatch."

On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe; he was not altogether
surprised to meet Burnamy with her, now. The young fellow asked if he
could be of any use to him, and then he said he would look him up in the
train. He seemed in a hurry, but when he walked away with Miss Triscoe he
did not seem in a hurry.

March remarked upon the change to his wife, and she sighed, "Yes, you can
see that as far as they're concerned."

"It's a great pity that there should be parents to complicate these
affairs," he said. "How simple it would be if there were no parties to
them but the lovers! But nature is always insisting upon fathers and
mothers, and families on both sides."

XIX.

The long train which they took at last was for the Norumbia's people
alone, and it was of several transitional and tentative types of cars.
Some were still the old coach-body carriages; but most were of a strange
corridor arrangement, with the aide at the aide, and the seats crossing
from it, with compartments sometimes rising to the roof, and sometimes
rising half-way. No two cars seemed quite alike, but all were very
comfortable; and when the train began to run out through the little
sea-side town into the country, the old delight of foreign travel began.
Most of the houses were little and low and gray, with ivy or flowering
vines covering their walls to their browntiled roofs; there was here and
there a touch of Northern Gothic in the architecture; but usually where
it was pretentious it was in the mansard taste, which was so bad with us
a generation ago, and is still very bad in Cuxhaven.

The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiar shapes of Holstein
cattle, herded by little girls, with their hair in yellow pigtails. The
gray, sto