The two tables, King’s and the Benson’s, united in an expedition to the Old Sweet, a drive of eighteen miles.  Mrs. Farquhar arranged the affair, and assigned the seats in the carriages.  It is a very picturesque drive, as are all the drives in this region, and if King did not enjoy it, it was not because Mrs. Farquhar was not even more entertaining than usual.  The truth is that a young man in love is poor company for himself and for everybody else.  Even the object of his passion could not tolerate him unless she returned it.  Irene and Mr. Meigs rode in the carriage in advance of his, and King thought the scenery about the tamest he had ever seen, the roads bad, the horses slow.  His ill-humor, however, was concentrated on one spot; that was Mr. Meigs’s back; he thought he had never seen a more disagreeable back, a more conceited back.  It ought to have been a delightful day; in his imagination it was to be an eventful day.  Indeed, why shouldn’t the opportunity come at the Old Sweet, at the end of the drive?—­there was something promising in the name.  Mrs. Farquhar was in a mocking mood all the way.  She liked to go to the Old Sweet, she said, because it was so intolerably dull; it was a sensation.  She thought, too, that it might please Miss Benson, there was such a fitness in the thing—­the old sweet to the Old Sweet.  “And he is not so very old either,” she added; “just the age young girls like.  I should think Miss Benson in danger—­seriously, now—­if she were three or four years younger.”

The Old Sweet is, in fact, a delightful old-fashioned resort, respectable and dull, with a pretty park, and a crystal pond that stimulates the bather like a glass of champagne, and perhaps has the property of restoring youth.  King tried the spring, which he heard Mrs. Farquhar soberly commending to Mr. Meigs; and after dinner he manoeuvred for a half-hour alone with Irene.  But the fates and the women were against him.  He had the mortification to see her stroll away with Mr. Meigs to a distant part of the grounds, where they remained in confidential discourse until it was time to return.

In the rearrangement of seats Mrs. Farquhar exchanged with Irene.  Mrs. Farquhar said that it was very much like going to a funeral each way.  As for Irene, she was in high, even feverish spirits, and rattled away in a manner that convinced King that she was almost too happy to contain herself.

Notwithstanding the general chaff, the singing, and the gayety of Irene, the drive seemed to him intolerably long.  At the half-way house, where in the moonlight the horses drank from a shallow stream, Mr. Meigs came forward to the carriage and inquired if Miss Benson was sufficiently protected against the chilliness of the night.  King had an impulse to offer to change seats with him; but no, he would not surrender in the face of the enemy.  It would be more dignified to quietly leave the Springs the next day.