were young engaged people:  without that their silver wedding journey would not be complete.  Her son said that everything was going well with ‘Every Other Week’, and both himself and Mr. Fulkerson thought his father ought to spend the winter in Italy, and get a thorough rest.  “Make a job of it, March,” Fulkerson wrote, “and have a Sabbatical year while you’re at it.  You may not get another.”

“Well, I can tell them,” said Mrs. March indignantly, “we shall not do anything of the kind.”

“Then you didn’t mean it?”

“Mean it!” She stopped herself with a look at her husband, and asked gently, “Do you want to stay?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he answered vaguely.  The fact was, he was sick of travel and of leisure; he was longing to be at home and at work again.  But if there was to be any self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain; which could be fairly divided between them, and leave him the self and her the sacrifice, he was too experienced a husband not to see the advantage of it, or to refuse the merit.  “I thought you wished to stay.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “I did.  It has been very, very pleasant, and, if anything, I have over-enjoyed myself.  We have gone romping through it like two young people, haven’t we?”

“You have,” he assented.  “I have always felt the weight of my years in getting the baggage registered; they have made the baggage weigh more every time.”

“And I’ve forgotten mine.  Yes, I have.  But the years haven’t forgotten me, Basil, and now I remember them.  I’m tired.  It doesn’t seem as if I could ever get up.  But I dare say it’s only a mood; it may be only a cold; and if you wish to stay, why—­we will think it over.”

“No, we won’t, my dear,” he said, with a generous shame for his hypocrisy if not with a pure generosity.  “I’ve got all the good out of it that there was in it, for me, and I shouldn’t go home any better six months hence than I should now.  Italy will keep for another time, and so, for the matter of that, will Holland.”

“No, no!” she interposed.  “We won’t give up Holland, whatever we do.  I couldn’t go home feeling that I had kept you out of your after-cure; and when we get there, no doubt the sea air will bring me up so that I shall want to go to Italy, too, again.  Though it seems so far off, now!  But go and see when the afternoon train for the Hague leaves, and I shall be ready.  My mind’s quite made up on that point.”

“What a bundle of energy!” said her husband laughing down at her.

He went and asked about the train to the Hague, but only to satisfy a superficial conscience; for now he knew that they were both of one mind about going home.  He also looked up the trains for London, and found that they could get there by way of Ostend in fourteen hours.  Then he went back to the banker’s, and with the help of the Paris-New York Chronicle which he found there, he got the sailings of the first steamers home.  After that he strolled about the streets for a last impression of Dusseldorf, but it was rather blurred by the constantly recurring pull of his thoughts toward America, and he ended by turning abruptly at a certain corner, and going to his hotel.