high neck-cloth and a good deal of pronunciation, who wore a dress-coat in the morning, which made one wonder what he wore in the evening, and had, or was supposed to have “property” and something to do with the Bible Society.  It couldn’t have been but that he was a good type.  Pemberton himself remembered Mrs. Clancy, a widowed sister of Mr. Moreen’s, who was as irritating as a moral tale and had paid a fortnight’s visit to the family at Nice shortly after he came to live with them.  She was “pure and refined,” as Amy said over the banjo, and had the air of not knowing what they meant when they talked, and of keeping something rather important back.  Pemberton judged that what she kept back was an approval of many of their ways; therefore it was to be supposed that she too was of a good type, and that Mr. and Mrs. Moreen and Ulick and Paula and Amy might easily have been of a better one if they would.

But that they wouldn’t was more and more perceptible from day to day.  They continued to “chivey,” as Morgan called it, and in due time became aware of a variety of reasons for proceeding to Venice.  They mentioned a great many of them—­they were always strikingly frank and had the brightest friendly chatter, at the late foreign breakfast in especial, before the ladies had made up their faces, when they leaned their arms on the table, had something to follow the demitasse, and, in the heat of familiar discussion as to what they “really ought” to do, fell inevitably into the languages in which they could tutoyer.  Even Pemberton liked them then; he could endure even Ulick when he heard him give his little flat voice for the “sweet sea-city.”  That was what made him have a sneaking kindness for them—­that they were so out of the workaday world and kept him so out of it.  The summer had waned when, with cries of ecstasy, they all passed out on the balcony that overhung the Grand Canal.  The sunsets then were splendid and the Dorringtons had arrived.  The Dorringtons were the only reason they hadn’t talked of at breakfast; but the reasons they didn’t talk of at breakfast always came out in the end.  The Dorringtons on the other hand came out very little; or else when they did they stayed—­as was natural—­for hours, during which periods Mrs. Moreen and the girls sometimes called at their hotel (to see if they had returned) as many as three times running.  The gondola was for the ladies, as in Venice too there were “days,” which Mrs. Moreen knew in their order an hour after she arrived.  She immediately took one herself, to which the Dorringtons never came, though on a certain occasion when Pemberton and his pupil were together at St. Mark’s—­where, taking the best walks they had ever had and haunting a hundred churches, they spent a great deal of time—­they saw the old lord turn up with Mr. Moreen and Ulick, who showed him the dim basilica as if it belonged to them.  Pemberton noted how much less, among its curiosities, Lord Dorrington carried himself as a man of the world; wondering too whether, for such services, his companions took a fee from him.  The autumn at any rate waned, the Dorringtons departed, and Lord Verschoyle, the eldest son, had proposed neither for Amy nor for Paula.