“O Fanny!” cried Kitty, with rapture; and then, with dismay, “How can I?”

“Why, very well, I think.  You’ve got this dress, and your travelling-suit; and I can lend you whatever you want.  Come!” she added joyously, “let’s go up to your room, and talk it over!”

The two ladies vanished upon this impulse, and the gentleman followed.  To their own relief the guiltless eaves-droppers, who found no moment favorable for revealing themselves after the comedy began, issued from their retiracy.

“What a remarkable little lady!” said Basil, eagerly turning to Isabel for sympathy in his enjoyment of her inconsequence.

“Yes, poor thing!” returned his wife; “it’s no light matter to invite a young lady to take a journey with you, and promise her all sorts of gayety, and perhaps beaux and flirtations, and then find her on your hands in a desolation like this.  It’s dreadful, I think.”

Basil stared.  “O, certainly,” he said.  “But what an amusingly illogical little body!”

“I don’t understand what you mean, Basil.  It was the only thing that she could do, to invite the young lady to go on with them.  I wonder her husband had the sense to think of it first.  Of course she’ll have to lend her things.”

“And you didn’t observe anything peculiar in her way of reaching her conclusions?”

“Peculiar?  What do you mean?”

“Why, her blaming her husband for letting her have her own way about the hotel; and her telling him not to mention his proposal to Kitty, and then doing it herself, just—­after she’d pronounced it absurd and impossible.”  He spoke with heat at being forced to make what he thought a needless explanation.

“O!” said Isabel, after a moment’s reflection.  “That!  Did you think it so very odd?”

Her husband looked at her with the gravity a man must feel when he begins to perceive that he has married the whole mystifying world of womankind in the woman of his choice, and made no answer.  But to his own soul he said:  “I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife’s acquaintance.  It seems I have been flattering myself.”

The next morning they went out as they had planned, for an exploration of Goat Island, after an early breakfast.  As they sauntered through the village’s contrasts of pigmy and colossal in architecture, they praisefully took in the unalloyed holiday character of the place, enjoying equally the lounging tourists at the hotel doors, the drivers and their carriages to let, and the little shops, with nothing but mementos of Niagara, and Indian beadwork, and other trumpery, to sell.  Shops so useless, they agreed, could not be found outside the Palms Royale, or the Square of St. Mark, or anywhere else in the world but here.  They felt themselves once more a part of the tide of mere sight-seeing pleasure-travel, on which they had drifted in other days, and in an eddy of which their love itself had opened its white blossom, and lily-like dreamed upon the wave.