lves. But even with the advantages of this seclusion Agatha's
confidences to her father were not full. She told her father that her
engagement was broken for reasons that did not mean anything very wrong
in Mr. Burnamy but that convinced her they could never be happy together.
As she did not give the reasons, he found a natural difficulty in
accepting them, and there was something in the situation which appealed
strongly to his contrary-mindedness. Partly from this, partly from his
sense of injury in being obliged so soon to adjust himself to new
conditions, and partly from his comfortable feeling of security from an
engagement to which his assent had been forced, he said, "I hope you're
not making a mistake."

"Oh, no," she answered, and she attested her conviction by a burst of
sobbing that lasted well on the way to the first stop of the train.

LXIX.

It would have been always twice as easy to go direct from Berlin to the
Hague through Hanover; but the Marches decided to go by Frankfort and the
Rhine, because they wished to revisit the famous river, which they
remembered from their youth, and because they wished to stop at
Dusseldorf, where Heinrich Heine was born. Without this Mrs. March, who
kept her husband up to his early passion for the poet with a feeling that
she was defending him from age in it, said that their silver wedding
journey would not be complete; and he began himself to think that it
would be interesting.

They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they woke early as people do
in sleeping-cars everywhere. March dressed and went out for a cup of the
same coffee of which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secret in Europe
as well as America, and for a glimpse of the twilight landscape. One gray
little town, towered and steepled and red-roofed within its mediaeval
walls, looked as if it would have been warmer in something more. There
was a heavy dew, if not a light frost, over all, and in places a pale fog
began to lift from the low hills. Then the sun rose without dispersing
the cold, which was afterwards so severe in their room at the Russischer
Hof in Frankfort that in spite of the steam-radiators they sat shivering
in all their wraps till breakfast-time.

There was no steam on in the radiators, of course; when they implored the
portier for at least a lamp to warm their hands by he turned on all the
electric lights without raising the temperature in the slightest degree.
Amidst these mod