March to join him in the dining-room where they had
stood talking.

"No, thank you," said the elder, "I don't propose sitting up all night,
and you'll excuse me if I go to bed now. It's a little informal to leave
a guest--"

"You're not leaving a guest! I'm at home here. I'm staying in this hotel
too."

March said, "Oh!" and then he added abruptly, "Good-night," and went up
stairs under the fresco of the five poets.

"Whom were you talking with below?" asked Mrs. March through the door
opening into his room from hers.

"Burnamy," he answered from within. "He's staying in this house. He let
me know just as I was going to turn him out for the night. It's one of
those little uncandors of his that throw suspicion on his honesty in
great things."

"Oh! Then you've been telling him," she said, with a mental bound high
above and far beyond the point.

"Everything."

"About Stoller, too?"

"About Stoller and his daughters, and Mrs. Adding and Rose and Kenby and
General Triscoe--and Agatha."

"Very well. That's what I call shabby. Don't ever talk to me again about
the inconsistencies of women. But now there's something perfectly
fearful."

"What is it?"

"A letter from Miss Triscoe came after you were gone, asking us to find
rooms in some hotel for her and her father to-morrow. He isn't well, and
they're coming. And I've telegraphed them to come here. Now what do you
say?"

LXII.

They could see no way out of the trouble, and Mrs. March could not resign
herself to it till her husband suggested that she should consider it
providential. This touched the lingering superstition in which she had
been ancestrally taught to regard herself as a means, when in a very
tight place, and to leave the responsibility with the moral government of
the universe. As she now perceived, it had been the same as ordered that
they should see Burnamy under such conditions in the afternoon that they
could not speak to him, and hear where he was staying; and in an inferior
degree it had been the same as ordered that March should see him in the
evening and tell him everything, so that she should know just how to act
when she saw him in the morning. If he could plausibly account for the
renewal of his flirtation with Miss Elkins, or if he seemed generally
worthy apart from that, she could forgive him.

It was so pleasant when he came in at breakfast with his well-remembered
smile, that she did not require from him any explicit de