He smiled miserably.  “Oh, I haven’t slept very well.  May I have my coffee with you?  I want to tell you something; I want you to make me.  But I can’t speak till the coffee comes.  Fraulein!” he besought a waitress going off with a tray near them.  “Tell Lili, please, to bring me some coffee—­only coffee.”

He tried to make some talk about the weather, which was rainy, and the Marches helped him, but the poor endeavor lagged wretchedly in the interval between the ordering and the coming of the coffee.  “Ah, thank you, Lili,” he said, with a humility which confirmed Mrs. March in her instant belief that he had been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and been rejected.  After gulping his coffee, he turned to her:  “I want to say good-by.  I’m going away.”

“From Carlsbad?” asked Mrs. March with a keen distress.

The water came into his eyes.  “Don’t, don’t be good to me, Mrs. March!  I can’t stand it.  But you won’t, when you know.”

He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressing himself more and more to the intelligence of March, who let him go on without question, and laid a restraining hand upon his wife when he saw her about to prompt him.  At the end, “That’s all,” he said, huskily, and then he seemed to be waiting for March’s comment.  He made none, and the young fellow was forced to ask, “Well, what do you think, Mr. March?”

“What do you think yourself?”

“I think, I behaved badly,” said Burnamy, and a movement of protest from Mrs. March nerved him to add:  “I could make out that it was not my business to tell him what he was doing; but I guess it was; I guess I ought to have stopped him, or given him a chance to stop himself.  I suppose I might have done it, if he had treated me decently when I turned up a day late, here; or hadn’t acted toward me as if I were a hand in his buggy-works that had come in an hour after the whistle sounded.”

He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone in Mrs. March’s eyes; but her husband only looked the more serious.

He asked gently, “Do you offer that fact as an explanation, or as a justification.”

Burnamy laughed forlornly.  “It certainly wouldn’t justify me.  You might say that it made the case all the worse for me.”  March forbore to say, and Burnamy went on.  “But I didn’t suppose they would be onto him so quick, or perhaps at all.  I thought—­if I thought anything—­that it would amuse some of the fellows in the office, who know about those things.”  He paused, and in March’s continued silence he went on.  “The chance was one in a hundred that anybody else would know where he had brought up.”

“But you let him take that chance,” March suggested.

“Yes, I let him take it.  Oh, you know how mixed all these things are!”

“Yes.”