“Agatha,” said the girl’s father, “Mr. March tells me that the museum over there is worth seeing.”

“Well,” the girl assented, and she took a winning leave of the Marches, and moved gracefully away with her father.

“I should have thought it was Agnes,” said Mrs. March, following them with her eyes before she turned upon her husband.  “Did he tell you Burnamy had been here?  Well, he has!  He has just gone on to Carlsbad.  He made, those poor old Eltwins stop over with him, so he could be with her.”

“Did she say that?”

“No, but of course he did.”

“Then it’s all settled?”

“No, it isn’t settled.  It’s at the most interesting point.”

“Well, don’t read ahead.  You always want to look at the last page.”

“You were trying to look at the last page yourself,” she retorted, and she would have liked to punish him for his complex dishonesty toward the affair; but upon the whole she kept her temper with him, and she made him agree that Miss Triscoe’s getting her father to Carlsbad was only a question of time.

They parted heart’s-friends with their ineffectual guide, who was affectionately grateful for the few marks they gave him, at the hotel door; and they were in just the mood to hear men singing in a farther room when they went down to supper.  The waiter, much distracted from their own service by his duties to it, told them it was the breakfast party of students which they had heard beginning there about noon.  The revellers had now been some six hours at table, and he said they might not rise before midnight; they had just got to the toasts, which were apparently set to music.

The students of right remained a vivid color in the impression of the university town.  They pervaded the place, and decorated it with their fantastic personal taste in coats and trousers, as well as their corps caps of green, white, red, and blue, but above all blue.  They were not easily distinguishable from the bicyclers who were holding one of the dull festivals of their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps they were sometimes both students and bicyclers.  As bicyclers they kept about in the rain, which they seemed not to mind; so far from being disheartened, they had spirits enough to take one another by the waist at times and waltz in the square before the hotel.  At one moment of the holiday some chiefs among them drove away in carriages; at supper a winner of prizes sat covered with badges and medals; another who went by the hotel streamed with ribbons; and an elderly man at his side was bespattered with small knots and ends of them, as if he had been in an explosion of ribbons somewhere.  It seemed all to be as exciting for them, and it was as tedious for the witnesses, as any gala of students and bicyclers at home.