s. From time to time March
interposed with a word of the German which had mostly deserted him in his
hour of need; but if it had been a flow of intelligible expostulation, it
would have had no effect upon the disputants. They grew more outrageous,
till the manager himself, appeared at the head of the stairs, and
extended an arresting hand over the hubbub. As soon as the situation
clarified itself he hurried down to his visitors with a polite roar of
apology and rescued them from the gendarme, and led them up to his room
and forced them into arm-chairs with a rapidity of reparation which did
not exhaust itself till he had entreated them with every circumstance of
civility to excuse an incident so mortifying to him. But with all his
haste he lost so much time in this that he had little left to show them
through the theatre, and their presentation to the prima donna was
reduced to the obeisances with which they met and parted as she went upon
the stage at the lifting of the curtain. In the lack of a common language
this was perhaps as well as a longer interview; and nothing could have
been more honorable than their dismissal at the hands of the gendarme who
had received them so stormily. He opened the door for them, and stood
with his fingers to his cap saluting, in the effect of being a whole file
of grenadiers.

XLIII.

At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of the box where he had been
sitting with the ladies during the absence of the gentlemen. He had
knocked at the door almost as soon as they disappeared, and if he did not
fully share the consternation which his presence caused, he looked so
frightened that Mrs. March reserved the censure which the sight of him
inspired, and in default of other inspiration treated his coming simply
as a surprise. She shook hands with him, and then she asked him to sit
down, and listened to his explanation that he had come back to Carlsbad
to write up the birthnight festivities, on an order from the Paris-New
York Chronicle; that he had seen them in the box and had ventured to took
in. He was pale, and so discomposed that the heart of justice was
softened more and more in Mrs. March's breast, and she left him to the
talk that sprang up, by an admirable effect of tact in the young lady,
between him and Miss Triscoe.

After all, she decided, there was nothing criminal in his being in
Carlsbad, and possibly in the last analysis there was nothing so very
wicked in his being