“Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me, Rose,” the editor protested, and he amplified his ignorance for the boy’s good to an extent which Rose saw was a joke.  He left Holland to talk about other things which his mother thought quite as bad for him.  He wished to know if March did not think that the statue of the bishop with the sparrow on its finger was a subject for a poem; and March said gayly that if Rose would write it he would print it in ‘Every Other Week’.

The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter.  “No, I couldn’t do it.  But I wish Mr. Burnamy had seen it.  He could.  Will you tell him about it?” He wanted to know if March had heard from Burnamy lately, and in the midst of his vivid interest he gave a weary sigh.

His mother said that now he had talked enough, and bade him say good-by to the Marches, who were coming so soon to Holland, anyway.  Mrs. March put her arms round him to kiss him, and when she let him sink back her eyes were dim.

“You see how frail he is?” said Mrs. Adding.  “I shall not let him out of my sight, after this, till he’s well again.”

She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby away with them which was not lost upon the witnesses.  He asked them to come into the reading-room a moment with him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were going to make some excuse to her for himself; but he said:  “I don’t know how we’re to manage about the Triscoes.  The general will have a room to himself, but if Mrs. Adding takes Rose in with her, it leaves Miss Triscoe out, and there isn’t a room to be had in this house for love or money.  Do you think,” he appealed directly to Mrs. March, “that it would do to offer her my room at the Swan?”

“Why, yes,” she assented, with a reluctance rather for the complicity in which he had already involved her, and for which he was still unpunished, than for what he was now proposing.  “Or she could come in with me, and Mr. March could take it.”

“Whichever you think,” said Kenby so submissively that she relented, to ask: 

“And what will you do?”

He laughed.  “Well, people have been known to sleep in a chair.  I shall manage somehow.”

“You might offer to go in with the general,” March suggested, and the men apparently thought this was a joke.  Mrs. March did not laugh in her feminine worry about ways and means.

“Where is Miss Triscoe?” she asked.  “We haven’t seen them.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Adding tell you?  They went to supper at a restaurant; the general doesn’t like the cooking here.  They ought to have been back before this.”

He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she said, “I suppose you would like us to wait.”

“It would be very kind of you.”

“Oh, it’s quite essential,” she returned with an airy freshness which Kenby did not seem to feel as painfully as he ought.

They all sat down, and the Triscoes came in after a few minutes, and a cloud on the general’s face lifted at the proposition Kenby left Mrs. March to make.