“He didn’t pay any attention to her.  He was all taken up with Lottie.”

“Well, that was lucky.  Sarah,” said the judge, “do you think he is like Bittridge?”

“He’s made me think of him all the time.”

“It’s curious,” the judge mused.  “I have always noticed how our faults repeat themselves, but I didn’t suppose our fates would always take the same shape, or something like it.”  Mrs. Kenton stared at him.  “When this other one first made up to us on the boat my heart went down.  I thought of Bittridge so.”

“Mr. Breckon?”

“Yes, the same lightness; the same sort of trifling—­Didn’t you notice it?”

“No—­yes, I noticed it.  But I wasn’t afraid for an instant.  I saw that he was good.”

“Oh!”

“What I’m afraid of now is that Ellen doesn’t care anything about him.”

“He isn’t wicked enough?”

“I don’t say that.  But it would be too much happiness to expect in one short life.”

The judge could not deny the reasonableness of her position.  He could only oppose it.  “Well, I don’t think we’ve had any more than our share of happiness lately.”

No one except Boyne could have made Trannel’s behavior a cause of quarrel, but the other Kentons made it a cause of coldness which was quite as effective.  In Lottie this took the form of something so active, so positive, that it was something more than a mere absence of warmth.  Before she came clown to breakfast the next morning she studied a stare in her mirror, and practised it upon Trannel so successfully when he came up to speak to her that it must have made him doubt whether he had ever had her acquaintance.  In his doubt he ventured to address her, and then Lottie turned her back upon him in a manner that was perfectly convincing.  He attempted a smiling ease with Mrs. Kenton and the judge, but they shared neither his smile nor his ease, and his jocose questions about the end of yesterday’s adventures, which he had not been privy to, did not seem to appeal to the American sense of humor in them.  Ellen was not with them, nor Boyne, but Trannel was not asked to take either of the vacant places at the table, even when Breckon took one of them, after a decent exchange of civilities with him.  He could only saunter away and leave Mrs. Kenton to a little pang.

“Tchk!” she made.  “I’m sorry for him!”

“So am I,” said the judge.  “But he will get over it—­only too soon, I’m afraid.  I don’t believe he’s very sorry for himself.”

They had not advised with Breckon, and he did not feel authorized to make any comment.  He seemed preoccupied, to Mrs. Kenton’s eye, when she turned it upon him from Trannel’s discomfited back, lessening in the perspective, and he answered vaguely to her overture about his night’s rest.  Lottie never made any conversation with Breckon, and she now left him to himself, with some remnants of the disapproval which she found on her hands after