th a
careless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.

Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once in
Carlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off and
was holding them in her lap. They fell to the ground when she now rose
from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up. Miss Triscoe was too
quick for her.

"Oh, let me carry them for you!" she entreated, and after a tender
struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearing
them through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist. She was not the
kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not the
kind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and let
March go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in the
Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath.

Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited
the girl's advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting it
in every case, with Miss Triscoe's eager approval. In the Stadt Park they
sat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite feints of
recovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased effusion.

When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been
sitting, they seemed to be followed. They looked round and saw no one
more alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim in
spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hat
brims are. He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, "Something left
lying," passed on.

They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at their
skirts to see if there was anything amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe
perceived her hands empty of Mrs. March's sandals and of Burnamy's
handkerchief.

"Oh, I put it in one of the toes!" she lamented, and she fled back to
their bench, alarming in her course the fears of a gendarme for the
public security, and putting a baby in its nurse's arms into such doubts
of its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry. She laughed
breathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March. "That comes of having no pocket;
I didn't suppose I could forget your sandals, Mrs. March! Wasn't it
absurd?"

"It's one of those things," Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards,
"that they can always laugh over together."

"They? And what about Burnamy's behavior to Stoller?"

"Oh, I don't call