et another."

"Well, I can tell them," said Mrs. March indignantly, "we shall not do
anything of the kind."

"Then you didn't mean it?"

"Mean it!" She stopped herself with a look at her husband, and asked
gently, "Do you want to stay?"

"Well, I don't know," he answered vaguely. The fact was, he was sick of
travel and of leisure; he was longing to be at home and at work again.
But if there was to be any self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were,
at a bargain; which could be fairly divided between them, and leave him
the self and her the sacrifice, he was too experienced a husband not to
see the advantage of it, or to refuse the merit. "I thought you wished to
stay."

"Yes," she sighed, "I did. It has been very, very pleasant, and, if
anything, I have over-enjoyed myself. We have gone romping through it
like two young people, haven't we?"

"You have," he assented. "I have always felt the weight of my years in
getting the baggage registered; they have made the baggage weigh more
every time."

"And I've forgotten mine. Yes, I have. But the years haven't forgotten
me, Basil, and now I remember them. I'm tired. It doesn't seem as if I
could ever get up. But I dare say it's only a mood; it may be only a
cold; and if you wish to stay, why--we will think it over."

"No, we won't, my dear," he said, with a generous shame for his hypocrisy
if not with a pure generosity. "I've got all the good out of it that
there was in it, for me, and I shouldn't go home any better six months
hence than I should now. Italy will keep for another time, and so, for
the matter of that, will Holland."

"No, no!" she interposed. "We won't give up Holland, whatever we do. I
couldn't go home feeling that I had kept you out of your after-cure; and
when we get there, no doubt the sea air will bring me up so that I shall
want to go to Italy, too, again. Though it seems so far off, now! But go
and see when the afternoon train for the Hague leaves, and I shall be
ready. My mind's quite made up on that point."

"What a bundle of energy!" said her husband laughing down at her.

He went and asked about the train to the Hague, but only to satisfy a
superficial conscience; for now he knew that they were both of one mind
about going home. He also looked up the trains for London, and found that
they could get there by way of Ostend in fourteen hours. Then he went
back to the banker's, and with the help of the Paris-New York Chronicle
which he fou