intance upon any terms unknown to him.

"Probably," Mrs. March said, "as long as he had any hopes of Mrs. Adding,
he was a little too self-conscious to be very up and down about Burnamy."

"Then you think he was really serious about her?"

"Now my dear! He was so serious that I suppose he was never so completely
taken aback in his life as when he met Kenby in Wurzburg and saw how she
received him. Of course, that put an end to the fight."

"The fight?"

"Yes--that Mrs. Adding and Agatha were keeping up to prevent his offering
himself."

"Oh! And how do you know that they were keeping up the fight together?"

"How do I? Didn't you see yourself what friends they were? Did you tell
him what Stoller had, said about Burnamy?"

"I had no chance. I don't know that I should have done it, anyway. It
wasn't my affair."

"Well, then, I think you might. It would have been everything for that
poor child; it would have completely justified her in her own eyes."

"Perhaps your telling her will serve the same purpose."

"Yes, I did tell her, and I am glad of it. She had a right to know it."

"Did she think Stoller's willingness to overlook Burnamy's performance
had anything to do with its moral quality?"

Mrs. March was daunted for the moment, but she said, "I told her you
thought that if a person owned to a fault they disowned it, and put it
away from them just as if it had never been committed; and that if a
person had taken their punishment for a wrong they had done, they had
expiated it so far as anybody else was concerned. And hasn't poor Burnamy
done both?"

As a moralist March was flattered to be hoist with his own petard, but as
a husband he was not going to come down at once. "I thought probably you
had told her that. You had it pat from having just been over it with me.
When has she heard from him?"

"Why, that's the strangest thing about it. She hasn't heard at all. She
doesn't know where he is. She thought we must know. She was terribly
broken up."

"How did she show it?"

"She didn't show it. Either you want to tease, or you've forgotten how
such things are with young people--or at least girls."

"Yes, it's all a long time ago with me, and I never was a girl. Besides,
the frank and direct behavior of Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been very
obliterating to my early impressions of love-making."

"It certainly hasn't been ideal," said Mrs. March with a sigh.

"Why hasn't it been ideal?" he asked. "Kenby is