cable the fellows in our office to say I’ve been misrepresented, and that my correction is coming.  We’ll get it into shape here together, and then I’ll cable that.  I don’t care for the money.  And I’ll get our counting-room to see this scoundrel”—­he picked up the paper that had had fun with him—­“and fix him all right, so that he’ll ask for a suspension of public opinion, and—­You see, don’t you?”

The thing did appeal to Burnamy.  If it could be done, it would enable him to make Stoller the reparation he longed to make him more than anything else in the world.  But he heard himself saying, very gently, almost tenderly, “It might be done, Mr. Stoller.  But I couldn’t do it.  It wouldn’t be honest—­for me.”

“Yah!” yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper into a wad and flung it into Burnamy’s face.  “Honest, you damn humbug!  You let me in for this, when you knew I didn’t mean it, and now you won’t help me out because it a’n’t honest!  Get out of my room, and get out quick before I—­”

He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightened himself, with “If you dare!” He knew that he was right in refusing; but he knew that Stoller was right, too, and that he had not meant the logic of what he had said in his letter, and of what Burnamy had let him imply.  He braved Stoller’s onset, and he left his presence untouched, but feeling as little a moral hero as he well could.

XXXVIII.

General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day’s pleasure, and in the self-reproach of a pessimist who has lost his point of view for a time, and has to work back to it.  He began at the belated breakfast with his daughter when she said, after kissing him gayly, in the small two-seated bower where they breakfasted at their hotel when they did not go to the Posthof, “Didn’t you have a nice time, yesterday, papa?”

She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at him across the little iron table, as she lifted the pot to pour out his coffee.

“What do you call a nice time?” he temporized, not quite able to resist her gayety.

“Well, the kind of time I had.”

“Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass?  I took cold in that old church, and the tea at that restaurant must have been brewed in a brass kettle.  I suffered all night from it.  And that ass from Illinois—­”

“Oh, poor papa!  I couldn’t go with Mr. Stoller alone, but I might have gone in the two-spanner with him and let you have Mr. or Mrs. March in the one-spanner.”

“I don’t know.  Their interest in each other isn’t so interesting to other people as they seem to think.”

“Do you feel that way really, papa?  Don’t you like their being so much in love still?”

“At their time of life?  Thank you it’s bad enough in young people.”

The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupied in pouring out her father’s coffee.