“I suppose you mean Felix,” said Acton.  And on Mr. Wentworth’s assenting, he said, “And the others?”

“Your sister has not come this evening.  You must have seen her at home,” said Mr. Wentworth.

“Yes.  I proposed to her to come.  She declined.”

“Lizzie, I suppose, was expecting a visitor,” said the old man, with a kind of solemn slyness.

“If she was expecting Clifford, he had not turned up.”

Mr. Wentworth, at this intelligence, closed the “North American Review” and remarked that he had understood Clifford to say that he was going to see his cousin.  Privately, he reflected that if Lizzie Acton had had no news of his son, Clifford must have gone to Boston for the evening:  an unnatural course of a summer night, especially when accompanied with disingenuous representations.

“You must remember that he has two cousins,” said Acton, laughing.  And then, coming to the point, “If Lizzie is not here,” he added, “neither apparently is the Baroness.”

Mr. Wentworth stared a moment, and remembered that queer proposition of Felix’s.  For a moment he did not know whether it was not to be wished that Clifford, after all, might have gone to Boston.  “The Baroness has not honored us tonight,” he said.  “She has not come over for three days.”

“Is she ill?” Acton asked.

“No; I have been to see her.”

“What is the matter with her?”

“Well,” said Mr. Wentworth, “I infer she has tired of us.”

Acton pretended to sit down, but he was restless; he found it impossible to talk with Mr. Wentworth.  At the end of ten minutes he took up his hat and said that he thought he would “go off.”  It was very late; it was ten o’clock.

His quiet-faced kinsman looked at him a moment.  “Are you going home?” he asked.

Acton hesitated, and then answered that he had proposed to go over and take a look at the Baroness.

“Well, you are honest, at least,” said Mr. Wentworth, sadly.

“So are you, if you come to that!” cried Acton, laughing.  “Why should n’t I be honest?”

The old man opened the “North American” again, and read a few lines.  “If we have ever had any virtue among us, we had better keep hold of it now,” he said.  He was not quoting.

“We have a Baroness among us,” said Acton.  “That ’s what we must keep hold of!” He was too impatient to see Madame Munster again to wonder what Mr. Wentworth was talking about.  Nevertheless, after he had passed out of the house and traversed the garden and the little piece of road that separated him from Eugenia’s provisional residence, he stopped a moment outside.  He stood in her little garden; the long window of her parlor was open, and he could see the white curtains, with the lamp-light shining through them, swaying softly to and fro in the warm night wind.  There was a sort of excitement in the idea of seeing Madame Munster again; he became aware that his heart was beating