“Aunt Caroline,” said the Senator firmly, “I’ll thank you to keep your spoon out of the preserves.  My daughter knows where I have given her hand, and that’s the direction she’s going with her feet.  Mary, I may as well inform you that the details of your wedding are being arranged in Chicago this minute.  It will take place within three weeks of our arrival, and it won’t be any slump.  But Richard Dod might as well be told right now that he won’t be in it, unless in the capacity of usher.  As I don’t contemplate breaking up this party and making things disagreeable all round, you’ll have to tell him yourself.  We sail from Liverpool”—­poppa looked at his watch—­“precisely one week and four hours from now, and if Mr. Dod has not agreed to the conditions I mention by that time we will leave him upon the shore.  That’s all I have to say, and between now and then I don’t expect you or anybody else to have the nerve to mention the matter to me again.”

After that it was impossible to wink at poppa, or in any way to give him the assurance that my regard for him was unimpaired.  There are things that can’t be passed over with a smile in one’s poppa without doing him harm, and this was one of them.  It was a regular manifesto, and I felt exactly like Lord Salisbury.  I couldn’t take him seriously, and yet I had to tell him to come on, if he wanted to, and devote his spare time to learning the language of diplomacy.  So I merely bowed with what magnificence I could command and filed it, so to speak; and walked to the other side of the deck, leaving poppa to his conscience and momma and his Aunt Caroline.  I left him with confidence, not knowing which would give him the worst time.  Mrs. Portheris began it, before I was out of earshot.  “For an American parent,” she said blandly, “it strikes me, Joshua, that you are a little severe.”

I found Mr. Mafferton interfering, as I expected, with Dicky and Isabel in their appreciation of the west shore.  He was pointing out the Villa Carlotta at Caddenabbia, and explaining the beauties of the sculptures there and dwelling on the tone of blue in the immediate Alps and reminding them that the elder Pliny once picked wild flowers on these banks, and generally making himself the intelligent nuisance that nature intended him to be.  In spite of it Isabel was radiant.  She said a number of things with the greatest ease; one saw that language, after all, was not difficult to her, she only wanted practice and an untroubled mind.  I looked at Dicky and saw that a weight had been removed from his, and it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that peace and satisfaction in this life would date for these two, if all went well for the next few days, from the Lake of Como.  But all could not be relied upon to go well so long as Mr. Mafferton hovered, quoting Claudian on the mulberry tree, upon the brink of a proposal, so I took him away to translate his quotation for me in the stern, which naturally suggested the past