“Basil,” she cried, “I have found out what the trouble is!  Where are the brides?”

He took her outstretched hands in his, and passing one of them through his arm walked with her apart from the children, who were examining at the news-man’s booth the moccasins and the birchbark bric-a-brac of the Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagara spar imported from Devonshire.

“My dear,” he said, “there are no brides; everybody was married twelve years ago, and the brides are middle-aged mothers of families now, and don’t come to Niagara if they are wise.”

“Yes,” she desolately asserted, “that is so!  Something has been hanging over me ever since we came, and suddenly I realized that it was the absence of the brides.  But—­but—­down at the hotels—­Didn’t you see anything bridal there?  When the omnibuses arrived, was there no burst of minstrelsy?  Was there—­”

She could not go on, but sank nervelessly into the nearest seat.

“Perhaps,” said Basil, dreamily regarding the contest of Tom and Bella for a newly-purchased paper of sour cherries, and helplessly forecasting in his remoter mind the probable consequences, “there were both brides and minstrelsy at the hotel, if I had only had the eyes to see and the ears to hear.  In this world, my dear, we are always of our own time, and we live amid contemporary things.  I daresay there were middle-aged people at Niagara when we were here before, but we did not meet them, nor they us.  I daresay that the place is now swarming with bridal couples, and it is because they are invisible and inaudible to us that it seems such a howling wilderness.  But the hotel clerks and the restaurateurs and the hackmen know them, and that is the reason why they receive with surprise and even offense our sympathy for their loneliness.  Do you suppose, Isabel, that if you were to lay your head on my shoulder, in a bridal manner, it would do anything to bring us en rapport with that lost bridal world again?”

Isabel caught away her hand.  “Basil,” she cried, “it would be disgusting!  I wouldn’t do it for the world—­not even for that world.  I saw one middle-aged couple on Goat Island, while you were down at the Cave of the Winds, or somewhere, with the children.  They were sitting on some steps, he a step below her, and he seemed to want to put his head on her knee; but I gazed at him sternly, and he didn’t dare.  We should look like them, if we yielded to any outburst of affection.  Don’t you think we should look like them?”

“I don’t know,” said Basil.  “You are certainly a little wrinkled, my dear.”

“And you are very fat, Basil.”

They glanced at each other with a flash of resentment, and then they both laughed.  “We couldn’t look young if we quarreled a week,” he said.  “We had better content ourselves with feeling young, as I hope we shall do if we live to be ninety.  It will be the loss of others if they don’t see our bloom upon us.  Shall I get you a paper of cherries, Isabel?  The children seem to be enjoying them.”