At one station Brock narrowly escaped missing the train.  He swung himself aboard as the cars were rolling out of the sheds.  As he sank, hot and exhausted, into the seat opposite his wife and her sister, the former looked up from her book, yawning ever so faintly, and asked: 

“Are you enjoying your honeymoon, Roxbury?”

“Immensely!” he exclaimed, but not until he had searched for and caught Connie’s truant gaze.  “Aren’t we?” he asked of Miss Fowler, his eyes dancing.  She smiled encouragingly.

“I think you are such a nice man to have about,” commented Mrs. Medcroft, this time yawning freely and stretching her fine young arms in the luxury of home contentment.

Brock went to bed early, in Vienna that night—­tired but happy, caring not what the morrow brought forth so long as it continued to provide him with a sister-in-law and a wife who was devoted—­to another man.

CHAPTER III

THE DISTANT COUSINS

The end of the week found Brock quite thoroughly domesticated—­to use an expression supplied by his new sister-in-law.  True, he had gone through some trying ordeals and had lost not a little of his sense of locality, but he was rapidly recovering it as the pathway became easier and less obscure.  At first he was irritatingly remiss in answering to the name of Medcroft; but, to justify the stupidity, it is only necessary to say that he had fallen into a condition which scarcely permitted him to know his own name, much less that of another.  He was under the spell!  Wherefore it did not matter at all what name he went by:  he would have answered as readily to one as the other.

He blandly ignored telegrams and letters addressed to Roxbury Medcroft, and once he sat like a lump, with everyone staring at him, when the chairman of the architects’ convention asked if Mr. Medcroft had anything to say on the subject under discussion.  He was forced, in some confusion, to attribute his heedlessness to a life-long defect in hearing.  Thereafter it was his punishment to have his name and fragments of conversation hurled about in tones so stentorian that he blushed for very shame.  In the Bristol, in the Kaerntner-Ring, in the Lichtenstein Gallery, in the Gardens—­no matter where he went—­if he were to be accosted by any of the genial architects it was always in a voice that attracted attention; he could have heard them if they had been a block away.  It became a habit with him to instinctively lift his hand to his ear when one of them hove in sight, having seen him first.

“That’s what I get for being a liar,” he lamented dolefully.  Constance had just whispered her condolences.  “Do you think they’ll consider it odd that you don’t shout at me too?”

“You might explain that you can tell what I am saying by looking at my lips,” she said.  He was immensely relieved.