“If you had told them we were going, dear,” said Mrs. March, when the couple were themselves gone, “we should have been as old as ever.  Don’t let us tell anybody, this morning, that we’re going.  I couldn’t bear it.”

They had been obliged to take the secretary of the hotel into their confidence, in the process of paying their bill.  He put on his high hat and came out to see them off.  The portier was already there, standing at the step of the lordly two-spanner which they had ordered for the long drive to the station.  The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offer them a fellow-republican’s good wishes for their journey; Herr Pupp himself appeared at the last moment to hope for their return another summer.  Mrs. March bent a last look of interest upon the proprietor as their two-spanner whirled away.

“They say that he is going to be made a count.”

“Well, I don’t object,” said March.  “A man who can feed fourteen thousand people, mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an archduke.”

At the station something happened which touched them even more than these last attentions of the hotel.  They were in their compartment, and were in the act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting their bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March’s name called.

They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with excitement and his eyes glowing.  “I was afraid I shouldn’t get here in time,” he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.

“Why Rose!  From your mother?”

“From me,” he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor, when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace.  “I want to kiss you,” she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to them from the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for her handkerchief.  “I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetest child!”

“He’s about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I’m sorry to leave behind,” March assented.  “He’s the only unmarried one that wasn’t in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some rather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I’m not sure that I should have been safe even from Rose.  Carlsbad has been an interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now that it will begin again.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “now we can have each other all to ourselves.”

“Yes.  It’s been very different from our first wedding journey in that.  It isn’t that we’re not so young now as we were, but that we don’t seem so much our own property.  We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we seem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come in and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk.  The disadvantage of living along is that we get too much into the hands of other people.”

“Yes, it is.  I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too.”