“The change in his mind will have to come pretty soon if I am to retain my mental faculties,” she declared.  “He might possibly, but I am afraid not,” she said, shaking her head.  “He has the idea fixed in his mind, and considerations of the weather here, while they got him started, are not now so much the question.  He has the moving fever, and I am afraid it will have to run its course.  I think,” she said, after a moment, “that if I were to formulate a special anathema, it would be, ’May traveling seize you!’”

“Or restlessness,” suggested John.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s more accurate, perhaps, but it doesn’t sound quite so smart.  Julius is in that state of mind when the only place that seems desirable is somewhere else.”

“Of course you will have to go,” said John mournfully.

“Oh, yes,” she replied, with an air of compulsory resignation.  “I shall not only have to go, of course, but I shall probably have to decide where in order to save my mind.  But it will certainly be somewhere, so I might as well be packing my trunks.”

“And you will be away indefinitely, I suppose?”

“Yes, I imagine so.”

“Dear me!” John ejaculated in a dismal tone.

They were sitting as described on a former occasion, and the young woman was engaged upon the second (perhaps the third, or even the fourth) of the set of doilies to which she had committed herself.  She took some stitches with a composed air, without responding to her companion’s exclamation.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he said presently, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging in an attitude of unmistakable dejection, and staring fixedly into the fire.

“I am very sorry myself,” she said, bending her head a little closer over her work.  “I think I like being in New York in the spring better than at any other time; and I don’t at all fancy the idea of living in my trunks again for an indefinite period.”

“I shall miss you horribly,” he said, turning his face toward her.

Her eyes opened with a lift of the brows, but whether the surprise so indicated was quite genuine is a matter for conjecture.

“Yes,” he declared desperately, “I shall, indeed.”

“I should fancy you must have plenty of other friends,” she said, flushing a little, “and I have wondered sometimes whether Julius’s demands upon you were not more confident than warrantable, and whether you wouldn’t often rather have gone elsewhere than to come here to play cards with him.”  She actually said this as if she meant it.

“Do you suppose—­” he exclaimed, and checked himself.  “No,” he said, “I have come because—­well, I’ve been only too glad to come, and—­I suppose it has got to be a habit,” he added, rather lamely.  “You see, I’ve never known any people in the way I have known you.  It has seemed to me more like home life than anything I’ve ever known.  There has never been any one but my father and I, and you can have no idea what it has been to me to be allowed to come here as I have, and—­oh, you must know—­” He hesitated, and instantly she advanced her point.